The baker who wants to create a community, bagel by bagel

In October, when antisemitic graffiti was sprayed on Avner’s, the “‘Eastern European bakery and bagelporium” in Sydney’s Surry Hills, its owner Ed Halmagyi went straight to Instagram with this message:

“We were very unfortunate that someone decided to vandalise our shop on the weekend. Unfortunately for them, they don’t realise just how strong we are as a community. But it’s going to happen to other people and I’ve got some advice for you. When it happens, don’t use it as a reason to withdraw and to feel like the world’s too big. Use it as an invitation to get bigger yourself. Stand taller. Be prouder and remember one very important thing: We’re Jewish, and we’re proud, and we’re strong.”

It’s not the first time in his career that Halmagyi has pushed back against intimidation. Towards the end of his 20-year stint as a television chef on Channel 7’s Better Homes and Gardens, Halmagyi got a Magen David tattooed on his arm and was asked to cover it up with make-up or long sleeves. “We’re not comfortable with you being overtly Jewish on screen,” he was told.

Not only did Halmagyi refuse, he doubled down. “I got myself another little nice piece,” he says, pointing to a tattoo of Hebrew script from Psalms. “Then I got the pomegranate to go with it because the pomegranate is symbolic of the 613 mitzvot.” He also has a tattoo with Shema Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad in Hebrew script, words which the bible compels us to bind to our hand and head. “I’ve bound it to my hand permanently!”

Whatever management thought of Halmagyi’s overt Jewishness became irrelevant when he walked away from his media career to open his small neighbourhood bakery early this year.

Why did he do it?

“I latched on to the thing that made me feel my life is most meaningful and that is the art of contributing to the experience of others. I wasn’t walking away from television, but rather, towards the thing that had made television so enjoyable to me. Being a chef is an act of service for somebody else. That’s a wonderful thing to be able to do.”

Halmagyi is genuine when he talks about service. He’s the one working every shift - prepping, cooking, pickling, chatting to customers - and he plans to keep it hands-on and small. He’s arrived at the place he wants to be.

“I didn’t want to put this in a five-star hotel as their in-house bakery. I like this little corner of land. I’ve run high-end pastry kitchens in patisseries and restaurants. I don’t want to do it again. I don’t want the unavoidable mediocrity that happens because you end up having to cut corners.”

Halmagyi says he wanted to do three things with Avner’s (his Hebrew name). First, create beautiful Jewish food. Second, create a neighbourhood; a community.

Pointing to a bank of folding glass doors, he says, “these doors open when I get in at 2 in the morning, they physically open, and they close when I turn off the lights, usually 6pm or 7pm. Other than that, these doors are open.” He’s been robbed once, at three in the morning when Halmagyi was out the back.

“Oh well, shit happens. I’m not going to lose my grander vision to the fact that some junkie needs to pay for a hit. That’s not the way I see the world. I want to create a community.” I can see for myself that it’s working. All the locals who pass by wave or stop to chat. He knows everyone by name and can recount what's happening in their lives.

Which brings us to the third reason for creating Avner’s: “I want people to know what it means to be Jewish in Australia today. We’re wonderful, open-hearted, hospitable, well-meaning, kind people. That’s who we are. And that generosity, that intelligence, that willingness to engage is the thing I want people to think about.”

He may be focussed on Judaism in the 21st century, but his food has its roots way back in history. When I visit, he’s preparing potato bread. “This is more of a shtetl bread. It’s made the same way that it was made for generations in Western Ukraine, through into Hungary and Romania. It’s a seasonal bread there, only when the potatoes are good, and it’s only done with the leftover potatoes or the ones which have gone a bit crabby.”

Halmagyi’s bread is dense and chewy, different to the other airy potato breads from some of the trendy new bakeries. “This is a very regionalised bread that most people around here haven’t seen before, and that’s part of the joy of exploration.

“You’ll be travelling a long road to find people who have read, studied and been awarded diplomas as much as I have in food science. I know my shit, I really do. But just because you can change something, doesn’t mean you have changed it for the better. We live in a cultural moment where creativity is valued over excellence. I didn’t start this place to reinvent bakery.

“Things that have been distilled through layered generations of culture - they’re not there because somebody could do it. They’re there because entire populations of people wanted to do it. History and culture are integral if you ask me.” And you can ask him because, along with his food science qualifications, he picked up the university medal in history when he was a young man undertaking his arts/law degree.

If you’re wondering why the good Jewish boy left the promise of a legal career to become a cook, it’s because the cooking actually came first. And not because he learnt in the kitchen at his mother’s side. Both his parents had busy work lives; his father a professor of neurology and his mother an academic in  computer science. Even his grandmother, a paediatrician, had never cooked a day before she emigrated from Hungary, and chose to order take-away once here.

“I was a shit of a child,” says Halmagyi, who kept being moved from one high school in Sydney to another as each  decided he would be better off elsewhere. “When I was 14, my dad had had enough, and said to me, ‘you need to get a job. It’s Saturday morning, off you go, and don’t come home until you've got one.’

“It was probably the single best thing that ever happened to me because I went out and walked maybe 15-20 kilometres and eventually came across a bakery cafe where they needed a kitchen hand. I started then and there. I had no idea what I was doing. Within a month I’d started to help with food prep, within three months I was cooking, within four months I was baking.”

While Avner’s fare has many familiar deli items - chicken soup with matzo dumplings, bagels with a schmear, chocolate babka - his take on the pastrami sandwich includes the unorthodox addition of sweet potatoes. Halmagyi has an answer for that. “We’ve bred up potatoes to be starchier, so they roast better, or to be waxier, so they mash better, but in doing so we’ve lost a lot of those original flavours. Now sweet potato is, in a lot of ways, the closest thing we have to some of those sweeter heirloom variety potatoes that my ancestors would have been enjoying in the 1600s.”       

He walks me around the back of the shop, which is filled with vats of pickles, and his prized custom-made smoker. “This is made out of the inner skin of a half type 2 Vietnam era torpedo. A friend of mine works for the navy. He’s a boilermaker and this is his little gift to me.     

“One of the rules of what we do is: if you eat it here, we make it here. There are no exceptions. We don’t buy anything in. From making our own amba condiment through to pastrami, lox, pickles, pickled yellow beetroot, sauerkraut….”

That need to make everything, to have total control over the quality of everything he sells, is keeping Halmagyi very busy. Too busy to do one of his favourite things: go to synagogue. “I’m here every Saturday and I can’t not be here. I don’t want to go on holidays, I don’t want time off - I want to be able to go to shul. I love synagogue.”

This passion for religion encompasses a belief in god. “I look out these windows and see people walking past, trees, dogs, cars. Do you really think this shit just happens? I don’t think so. The idea that god doesn’t exist is a much harder case to make than god does exist. The fundamental understanding of a divine origin to the world is pretty inescapable. Suddenly there was everything and it came from nothing. Are you talking about Genesis 1 or are you talking about Big Bang theory? They are identical in their fundamentals."

Halmagyi wears his faith and his convictions on his sleeve. Literally. Just as he took to social media after the vandalisation of Avner’s to assert Jewish pride, his response to the murderous attack on Israel by Hamas a year earlier was to add to those tattoos which had caused him so much trouble on TV.  

 “On October 8 last year, I sat in bed with a needle and some dye and did that to myself while doom scrolling.” He points to a menorah. And when I wince and say “painful,” he replies, “not as painful as what I was watching or (have) seen every day since.

“I know who I am. I know who I want to be. I know what I’ll tolerate and what I won’t. I love being Jewish. I’m proudly Jewish and I’m not prepared to let anything get in my way.”