In the Industrial Back Alleys of Beijing, A little bit of Gotham
It is a well known fact that bagels get significantly worse as your travel outside the New York metro area. Westchester bagels are barely passable, South Carolina bagels are little more then circular bread, and in California it is almost impossible to tell the difference between a bagel and a hockey puck. So one can only imagine how appalling the state of the bagel must be in China. Lejen Chen, a Chinese-American who grew up in Brooklyn was shocked to find that a hotel in Guilin was advertising a hamburger roll with a hole in the middle as a bagel. Horrified and disgusted Ms.Chen sought to amend this problem by bringing the immense joy of the bagel to China.
Ms.Chen set up a shop called Mrs.Shanen’s in Beijing. The name from compressing her husband’s name, Shan En, into one word. Ms. Chens bagel shop serves to the delight of curious locals and home sick foreigners. But creating a bagel shop in China was a challenge. It would have been too costly to ship bagel manufacturing equipment from the United States to China, so Shen but his engineering skills to good use and converted an old noodle maker into a bagel presser and made a bagel boiler from production ovens. In a world where horrible bagels outnumber good bagels 2:1, it is good to know that Ms.Chen is bringing hope to a formerly bagel-less place.