New Orleans has always been a town that prides itself on its home-grown baked goods. From huge muffuletta wheels to lighter-than-air French loaves stuffed to brimming with fried shrimp or oysters, not to mention buttermilk drops and beignets, no trip to the Crescent City would be complete without an intense carbohydrate binge. But bagels? Not so much. Up until recent years, if you had a hankering for a freshly baked bagel the likes of which you might find on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the best you might get might be a dozen shipped frozen from New York. But as the culture tides shift over the years, a number of enterprising New Orleans bakers became inspired to up the bagel game in the 504.
Among these devotees of the mystic art and delicate science of bagelry is Breanne Kostyk, chef and co-owner of Flour Moon Bagels, tucked cozily along the Lafitte Greenway in Mid-City. Not that she was born a bagel maven. In fact, Kostyk, an East Coast native, got her degree in graphic design.
“I went to art school in Brooklyn and graduated in 2008 at the peak of the recession,” Kostyk said, “and couldn’t find a job to save my life. After about a year of being unemployed I joined this program called ‘Project M,’ which was a select group of 10-15 creative individuals at a design retreat. The idea was to come up with some project that benefited the community. We came up with this concept of bringing people together over pie, and we created a pie shop/design studio in rural Alabama. I wound up creating a small culinary program to work with GED students, and I taught them how to bake, and necessary skills to run a little restaurant. I wasn’t a cook before that, just a home baker, so it was all new for me. I ended up loving it so much, and loving the South, so I ended up moving to Birmingham. And that’s when I first got more into restaurants.”
Kostyk quickly found a gig as a pastry chef in Alabama, which led her to follow her boss, lauded Chef Jeffrey Hansell, to open up Oxlot 9 in Covington, and after that an executive pastry chef job at the Ace Hotel, where the idea to form a bagel shop first came into play. Said Kostyk, “While I was there, one of my chefs said, ‘I’d really like you to develop a bagel recipe.” And I was super excited, because obviously I had not found a bagel I loved and I really missed them, so I started experimenting with that and tweaking my recipes and realizing that it was a good bagel. I really enjoyed making them and eating them, and a lot of our customers, especially from New York, would say, ‘Whoa, this is a really great bagel!’”
Following her passion for the perfect bagel led Kostyk to start a pop-up called “Flour Moon” during the pandemic lockdown in 2020, where she and partner Jeff Hinson would turn up at Coffee Science in Mid-City to sell a few dozen over the weekends. New Orleanians, clearly exhilarated by the idea, flocked to social media by the score to sing their praises. And with that, Kostyk’s once humble dream of maybe opening a bagel shop began to turn into a reality. Two years later, Kostyk and Hinson opened their first brick and mortar bagel shop on the Greenway, and it hit the ground running. As always, the hungry hordes of NOLA know a good thing when they eat it, and it wasn’t long before lines stretched out the door of the shop and spilled onto the Greenway.
But what makes Flour Moon’s bagels so crave-worthy and Instagrammable? Like all great baked goods, it’s an amalgam of both artistry and organic chemistry. ““A perfect bagel has to have that nice crunchy exterior,” said Kostyk. It’s gotta have the chew, you’ve got to fight back. But also, I make mine a little bit airier than some you might find in New York. I do use part sourdough and part commercial yeast, so it gives it a little more oomph and depth of flavor than just regular yeast. But also a bagel that’s full sourdough is aggressive at times, so it’s that in-between of flavor and fermentation. They’re definitely not as big as some of the hubcaps you see nowadays. After you eat a whole one of our bagels, you won’t leave feeling gross, even if it’s the hearty egg sandwich. It still feels manageable.”
It doesn’t hurt that Flour Moon’s bagels aren’t only fabulously delicious, they’re also gorgeous. Take, for instance, the “New Moon” tartine, which uses the bagel as a palette to showcase a schmear of scallion cream cheese topped with salmon roe, radishes and herbs, a combination that is just as gustatorially gratifying as it is a feast for the eyes. And nearly all of the menu items follow suit, from the “Harvest Moon,” which features roasted carrot spread, tahini, cucumber, onion, olives, herbs and duqqa, to hot smoked salmon with kimchi cream cheese, pickled red cabbage and mustard seeds, and even a whitefish salad that will make smoked fish lovers in the Crescent City relieved that they don’t have to buy a plane ticket to NYC to get their fix of the good stuff.
If that were the sum total of Flour Moon’s ambitions, we would all be happy and better off for it. But add to that treats for Jewish holidays like hamantaschen, decadent rugelach, chocolate babka, and even an honest-to-goodness bialy that takes three days to properly ferment, and the shop takes itself into the stratosphere of quintessential Eastern European baked delights, the likes of which we seldom see in the Crescent City.
“We just wanted good food,” Kostyc said, “something that you might expect from a fine dining restaurant, flavor-wise, on a bagel. We wanted it to be beautiful, especially our tartines. That’s definitely how my art has evolved. Originally, I was into drawing and painting and graphic design. And that evolved into pastry, so I was always making beautiful artwork on a plate, and this is the next evolution of that creativity. And if you create something beautiful, people are going to take a photo and share it, and the constant shares are what generates new customers and engagement.”
As fun as it is to fill our feeds with mouth-watering pics of Flour Moon’s creations, we know we’ll be coming back to eat. Because a good bagel in New Orleans? That’s a rare and special thing, indeed.
About the Chef
A Connecticut native, chef Breanne Kostyk grew up baking in the kitchen with her mother, but it wasn’t until she moved down South that she found her true passion in the pastry arts. After honing her management chops in a fast-casual restaurant in Birmingham, she honed her skills and artistry at the Veranda on Highland under the tutelage of Chef Jeffrey Hansell, whom she followed to Covington’s Oxlot 9, and from there an executive pastry chef position at the Ace Hotel before venturing out on her own with partner Jeff Hinson to open Flour Moon in the Spring of 2022. “I expected this to be just a little, humble shop,” she said. “I had two line cooks, I didn’t have a dishwasher or a prep cook. I think we had two people up front and I had one baker that was going to be part-time. And the first weekend we opened, the line was to the street and we were like ‘wow!’ Now we’re up to 15 team members. We have fun doing it every day, and I love coming in here.”
