The Other Mother

The origins of the up-RYES starter, or "mother dough," can be traced back to Price's work at Acme Bakery in San Francisco in 1995. From there it was used to bake true French sourdough at the Old Chatham Inn in upstate New York where he ran the bakery. Five years later the same starter contributed to the first bread baked in the brick oven at Primo in Rockland, Maine, the farm-to-table restaurant Price founded and co-owned for seventeen years.

"When I go on vacation people have to babysit the starter. When the restaurant [Primo] would close for a few months in the winter my mom would watch it and feed it. More than a million people fed!" Price reflects proudly. "The starter is a metaphor for life... The love and care, the nurturing of the bread (or starter), not giving up on it, feeding your family every week...

"It's been 25 years of loving bread and loving what it gives to people."

The first thing you eat when you go to a good restaurant is the bread and you know right away, when you taste good bread, that everything else is going to be good, too, that everything is going to be ok.

So, as the Sicilians say, "Tutti pane!"

It's all bread.

And the Bagel?

Are they "New York Style?" "Montreal?"

Short answer: Both.

The bagels at up-RYES are a hybrid creation and, what Price hopes, have everything one could want in a bagel. They are hand-rolled and hearth-baked in small batches which means they are coming out of the oven every hour.

And seeds? Yeah, we've got those, lots of them. Our bagels are super seedy, top and bottom.

As tradition keeps, these hybrid bagels are hand-rolled, boiled and then baked, and the perfect combination of chewy and crispy. They are what we like to think of as the "perfect" bagel.