The smell of bagels wafting through the air and the sight of a line spilling out the door are all tell-tale signs of a good bakeshop. Bagelsaurus, a bagel shop in Cambridge, has 4.6 stars and over 1,700 reviews on Google Reviews. Not everyone can run a successful bagel store; however, Bagelsaurus owner and Wayland resident Mary Ting Hyatt can.

The shop, located in Porter Square, MA, offers a wide variety of bagel and cream cheese flavors along with bagel sandwiches, drinks and treats. Their bagels are highly celebrated across statelines, as they won “Best of the Fest award” at the New York City Bagel Competition. In addition, they have also been awarded with the title of “Best Bagels” in 2015, 2016 and 2019 by Boston Magazine and recognized as one of the “Best Bagel Shops in America” by Food & Wine Magazine.

The success of the bagels can be credited to their unique recipe that sets them apart from a typical white bread bagel.

“What makes them [the bagels] different is that they’re sourdough based, and they’re not as dense as a typical bagel,” Hyatt said. “They have a crispy exterior, but more of like an open airy crumb, which makes them a little bit different, but they still have the chewiness that you would expect from a typical bagel.”

Although Hyatt is currently an award-winning bakeshop owner, prior to college, she didn’t have an extensive culinary background. Being an English major, she planned to go into teaching, but instead fell in love with food while at a Middlebury College study abroad program in Argentina.

“I was able to dine out with friends a lot [in Argentina] in a way I wasn’t able to at home in the U.S.,” Hyatt said. “It opened my eyes to food in a new way.”

In the summer, Hyatt started watching food television networks and found a new passion for cooking. On a whim, she decided to attend culinary school after getting rejected from her top-choice teaching jobs. She attended culinary school at the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts, where she graduated from the Professional Chefs Program in 2008.

“I thought [cooking] would be a temporary thing until I figured out what I wanted to do, but I got hooked,” Hyatt said.

After graduating, Hyatt worked at restaurants and bakeries in her area. While working for other businesses, the idea of opening a bakery lingered in her mind.

“I’d always kind of thought maybe I would want to have my own small business, which seemed scary, but I just kind of rode the wave and went with it,” Hyatt said. “I wasn’t too scared at the time I started [Bagelsaurus] in my twenties when I was a lot braver, so I’m glad I did it when I was young.”

Hyatt’s bagel shop dream was inspired by a similar bagel shop near Middlebury College. This local bagel shop was a community space where students and town residents could hang out and talk to one another. Hyatt observed that there weren’t many local bagel shops near major Boston-area colleges such as Harvard University, Lesley University and Tufts University.

“I just thought somebody is bound to open [a bagel store], and the years kept coming and nobody was opening a bagel shop,” Hyatt said. “That’s when I started thinking more seriously about [opening a bagel shop].”

In 2013, Bagelsaurus came to life as a pop-up in the sandwich shop Cutty’s, where Hyatt was managing the kitchen at the time. Hyatt shared her dream of opening a bagel shop with Cutty’s owners, and they allowed her to test recipe’s in the store’s kitchen until it was good enough to be sold publicly.

“I did [tested recipes] two days a week for a year on Fridays and Saturdays, and we didn’t really have the right equipment,” Hyatt said. “I just made it work and mixed the dough by hand and it was all a very slow process, so when it got popular, it was time to move out and find a space.”

After getting the recipe right, Hyatt started a weekly bagel pop-up in Cutty’s for customers.

During her time at Cutty’s, Hyatt created a following of people she likes to call “sea salt bagel with honey-rosemary cream cheese enthusiasts.” These early Bagelsaurus fans were mainly Dana Farber Cancer Center employees who happened to work close to Cutty’s.

“I don’t know how these things happened, but somebody ordered [a sea salt bagel with honey-rosemary cream cheese] and told other people,” Hyatt said. “I didn’t come up with that [combination]. I mean, I came up with the honey rosemary cream cheese, but putting it with the sea salt bagel was something that the customers just did.”

Eventually, Hyatt shifted Bagelsaurus away from being a popup and created a stand-alone store in Porter Square. However, Hyatt was not quite prepared for what Bagelsaurus would soon turn into.

“I did not envision it to be as popular as it is, so we’ve been fortunate in a lot of ways,” Hyatt said.
”I kind of thought I was going to open a quiet little cafe where people might bring their laptops and stay for a while, and that’s very much not what it is.”

Hyatt’s initial expectations were turned on their head as customers began to flood into the store. According to Google Maps and Google Search’s popular search feature, the typical wait time for Bagelsaurus is 20 minutes.

Two of the things that help Bagelsaurus succeed are the quality of bagels themselves and the location. The store’s placement next to the colleges allows for many visitors and regulars to create a connection to Bagelsaurus, while appealing to students looking for a bite to eat before class. Additionally, Bagelsaurus focusses on its one shop, as opposed to opening different locations, to make it the best it can be.

“I’m biased, but I do think our product is very good,” Hyatt said. “I do think the staff and what we’ve been able to build as a culture at the shop is special, and I think that the customers feel that when they come in.”

According to Bagelsaurus’s operations manager Dakota Jensen, a key factor in the shop’s success is Hyatt herself.

“Mary is an exceptional business owner,” Jensen said. “She is very involved in the day to day operations of the shop, and is very supportive of her staff.”

Mirroring Jensen’s sentiment, Hyatt credits the staff for store’s success. According to Hyatt, some staff members begin working at 3 a.m. to start boiling and baking. Additionally, there’s a staff member who commutes from New Hampshire every day, and there are other members who’ve been working at Bagelsaurus for 11 years.

“[Hyatt] has a good sense of business, but her focus is always the experience of customers and the wellbeing of her team,” Jensen said. “I think that kind of leadership is what made Bagelsaurus so successful.”

The success of Bagelsaurus’s product and management style has led to media attention beyond magazine features and culinary awards. American restaurateur and author Guy Fieri featured the shop in his “Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives” television show in 2019.

“Working with the crew and then meeting him, doing the whole TV thing, learning how that’s all made was very exciting, and a break from the norm, so that was really cool,” Hyatt said.

According to Hyatt, preparing Bagelsaurus for the show took a lot of work, as they had to prepare the recipes in different stages of the baking process. Specifically, Bagelsaurus created the dough, boiled and baked the bagels and shut the restaurant for two days to prepare. However, watching the crew set up, film and feature the store was a highlight of Hyatt’s experience as a business owner.

“The one thing that I don’t like about this bagel is that one order of it is already gone,” Fieri said in the television episode featuring Bagelsaurus. “As a bagel, it’s of the best we’ve ever had on this show.”

According to Jensen, the team still gets emails and customers who visit the store because of the feature on Guy Fieri’s show.

“Customers still bring up the episode all the time,” Jensen said. “It’s fun getting emails and calls from all over the US when the episodes re-run.”

Hyatt’s fame on television didn’t stop at “Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives”, as she was invited on to “Guy Fieri’s Grocery Games” television show in 2020.

“That was fun,” Hyatt said. “It was a little more high pressure in some ways because you show up and you don’t really know what’s gonna happen and they give you a challenge.”

Her episode was sandwich themed and she competed against two other chefs to make the best sandwich. Competitors like Hyatt are given a time and a challenge to add the competitive element. The novelty of the show is that there is a grocery store at their disposal to cook their food. Judges on the show determine which chef triumphs over the others by ranking the final products.

For the future of Bagelsaurus, Hyatt does not intend to expand to other locations but plans to create new items for the menu.

“We’ve been very open to change over the years, so we’re always trying to improve,” Hyatt said. “We’re not set in our ways, so I think that’s really helped us to get through different seasons, like COVID. We leave ourselves adaptable.”