Nora Grace-Flood Photos
Milling your own grain is like grinding coffee to order, according to Frisch, who does both.
Bill Frisch signed up for the city’s DNA of the Entrepreneur program — and found the right recipe to make his business, East Rock Breads, rise to the top.
City officials joined Frisch outside his shop at 942 State Street Friday to cut a formal ribbon for the new shop and publicize the secret ingredient to that shared success: $15,000 in funding from the city’s Leaseholder Improvement Program.
Frisch wouldn’t have found out about that funding without the entrepreneur training. He wouldn’t have been able to buy a grain mill without that $15,000. And without the mill grain, Frisch’s baguettes and bagels wouldn’t boast such fragrant flavors.
So goes the story of Bill Frisch, whom Deputy Economic Development Administrator Carlos Eyzaguirre deemed an “Instagram sensation” for the already popular bakery, which opened its doors in January.
“People from all over the country are following this place,” Eyzaguirre declared.
“It is your lucky day when you get a cinnamon bun, because they sell out just that fast,” Fair Haven and State Street Alder Caroline Tanbee Smith said. The storefront “exemplifies what’s special and possible here in New Haven,” she said.
Frisch opened the “bakery of my dreams” at the start of 2024 after following his partner, a graduate student at the Yale School of Drama, from Chicago to New Haven.
A professional percussionist, he started working in bakeries after experiencing disillusion over the “competitive and stuffy” music industry. Baking had “always been a hobby,” he said.
Once in New Haven, he snagged a job making cookies for Elena’s ice cream shop on Orange. Meanwhile, he started selling bagels out of his own house when an opportunity to bake bread for a living at existing stores in the city proved difficult to find.
Before he knew it, he was a licensed Cottage Food Operator churning “as many bagels as I could” out of his East Rock apartment.
“Bagels are the easiest thing to do from home,” he said. “It’s just boil and bake.”
Looking to take his business to the next level, he checked out the city’s Small Business Resource Center and learned about both the DNA of the Entrepreneur and later the Livable City Initative’s Leaseholder Improvement grant matching programs.
He wrote a business plan. He secured the city’s maximum grant size for small business startups. He started renting a laundromat on State Street, which his landlord let him make over into an industrial kitchen.
That money ended up paying for all the equipment Frisch purchased for the property: Racks, ovens, refrigerators, and a grain mill.
Now, Frisch isn’t just throwing out bagels and seeing where they land. He is specializing in sourdough loaves and putting out weekly specials, like purple potato breads, ham and cheese croissants, and asparagus tarts, in addition to the Saturday morning cinnamon buns drooled over by Alder Smith.
It wasn’t quite so simple. The bake time turned out to be extensive. Frisch originally planned to open his store this time last year, but came up against problems applying for restaurant licensure and negotiating funding terms.
He said he wished the city had a clear point person to walk wannabe business owners through city approval processes. The online system is confusing, he said, one reason the opening date “kept getting pushed further and further back.” He found out later in the game that his bakery wasn’t up to fire code, he said, “because I just never really understood who I was supposed to ask” about such questions.
While the LCI grant was key in his success, Frisch noted that it also took eight months after he was awarded the money before he ended up collecting any cash. Plus, he had to put up $15,000 in order to receive the city’s matching grant, but wasn’t making any money for the near-year he was waiting on the grant’s clearance to start construction.
“You’re really not making any money and you need to spend $30,000 to get half of that amount. It’s tough. But it’s just the rules of the grant,” he said. “In the end, it all worked out.”
Once the patrons and politicians cleared out Friday, it was time for Frisch to get back to work — shaping 400 bagels.
“I’m usually in bed by 7 p.m.,” he said. “I’ve been getting up around 1 a.m.”
“I’m living the dream,” he said with a smile.
Bill Frisch's partner, Ida Cuttler, cuts the ribbon on East Rock Breads.