“I’m gonna sit here and I’m gonna cook 600 eggs, four pans at a time. I’ll be here for four hours cooking eggs in these little rectangle Japanese omelet pans, because that’s what it takes.”

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This is chef Scott Walton, owner of Gussy’s Bagels & Deli on Fifth Avenue in Oakland, Pittsburgh, gripping two palm-sized rectangular cast iron skillets in each hand as he stares down an entire plastic bin of raw scrambled eggs.

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Gussy’s (named after Scott’s friend Gus Frerotte, an NFL quarterback) is a small shop squished between Three D’s Tobacco Shop and Mala Hotpot only a few blocks down from the heart of the University of Pittsburgh’s main Oakland campus. The storefront has been freshly repainted a pearly white, and an orange sign proclaiming “Gussy’s Bagels & Deli” hangs beneath a large blue “Now Open” banner. The shop has been open for four weeks now, with a small but steady stream of customers passing in and out clutching unadorned brown paper bags with sandwiches the size of small footballs inside.

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“It’s bread and water that nurtures the soul,” says Scott, leaning back in one of the wooden booths in his shop. He’s a soft, bald, round man in his late forties. His gray t-shirt emblazoned with Gussy’s logo has a hearty splash of bagel grease on the chest. Something about him radiates comfort and wisdom. There’s a history in his eyes that has travelled across the country.

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“I wanted to come up with bagels that were very similar to New York, but not New York,” he continues. “So I came up with a mix between Montreal and New York, because Montreal’s bagels are pretty famous and legendary. What I really want to do is provide people with the real experience. I’m here at four in the morning proofing bagels and rolling them out by hand.”

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The inside of the shop is what you might expect from any Oakland establishment: a narrow, corridor-like seating area with tight, bright orange booths on either side, some exposed brick walls, and plenty of stairs in places where stairs shouldn’t be. Periodically, one of Scott’s college-age employees will scurry down the steep staircase tucked into the corner of the seating area to grab supplies from the shop’s basement storage.

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He’s done his best to decorate the place, though. The wooden walls are painted the same bright white as the storefront, which contrasts starkly with the auburn brick. Framed black-and-white close-up photos of Gussy’s massive sandwiches hang on the walls. At the front of the store, perpendicular to the door, is a large, refrigerated glass case where Scott displays loaves of bread (marble rye, soft Italian), homemade cream cheese schmears (caper, wild berry, scallion), and cured meats (pastrami, corned beef, smoked salmon). Next to the case are a stack of enclosed shelves illuminated by heat lamps, where the morning’s supply of rectangular eggs, bacon, and sausage patties wait to be pressed between two halves of a bagel.

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“Baking has always been my biggest passion.” Scott says. “When I put together this menu, it just clicked. After 30 years working with food, I finally figured out what my voice was. I love to bake. I just don’t like to do it commercially. I don’t like to do mass production. We do everything by hand here. Some days, depending on who’s rolling, some bagels might be prettier than others, but that’s part of the charm.”

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He glances at the kitchen, where two young women are making sandwiches for a few customers that have just walked in. “There’s also two pieces of equipment here that you don’t see anywhere else these days. That’s one of them, a 70-year-old Bari pizza oven from Italy—” a massive steel oven that takes up most of the wall behind the front counter— “and a 60-year-old Hobart mixer—” a five-foot-tall contraption that looks like a steel KitchenAid mixer on steroids— “which you just can’t buy anywhere.”

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Scott’s roots aren’t in the bagel industry, though. While growing up near Chicago, he gained a love for cooking from his mother, who baked a lot, and his brother, who took culinary courses in France. He studied chemistry in college, but constantly felt himself drawn towards the art of food. Scott finally found his passion when he enrolled in culinary school at 21. After opening high-profile restaurants like Howells & Hood and Markethouse in his home city, he moved to Pittsburgh to open even more restaurants, such as Acorn in Shadyside and Scarpino downtown. He’s also the executive chef at Heinz Field sponsoring the Pittsburgh Steelers, and he’s even made a few appearances on the Food Network.

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“I literally study food every night,” says Scott. “The world of food changes every day. The change is constantly what the best people are doing all over the world. At one point, I had 300 to 350 different spices. I started curing and fermenting meats and fish 20 years ago, before charcuterie became a huge thing.”

           

But the intensity of fine dining had taken its toll on Scott. “I would put a menu together, and I would change the menu weekly. I always say it’s chasing a ghost. I’ve done one dinner service in my whole life that I would consider perfect. One. You’re chasing the ghost of being perfect. It all has to click. Every night is like an orchestra. If you have just one guy playing out of tune, it just doesn’t sound the same.”

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What really attracted Scott to opening his own walk-in bagel and sandwich shop was the ability to pull back from the stress that the fine dining experience demands. That doesn’t mean that Scott is sacrificing quality for speed and simplicity, though. He’s been frustrated for a while now by a trend that’s becoming all the more prevalent in the modern era: choosing speed over experience. Places like Einstein Bros. and Bruegger’s Bagels lack that personal touch that Scott believes is the essence to having an authentic and superb dining experience. They’ve gone mainstream, corporate, all in an effort to maximize sales and minimize costs in materials and time.

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It’s extremely effective for them, too. Scott and his culinary friends back in Chicago all share the very same frustration that we hear all the time these days: It’s hard to find people that care about what they do anymore. Culinary schools around the country are facing declining enrollment rates. Schools like the Culinary Institute of Charleston and the New England Culinary Institute have seen enrollment drop by as much as 25% or more over the past three years. Restaurant sales dropped 19.2% due to Covid-19’s impact on the industry.

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It’s more than just the dining sector. Everywhere we look, we see a society driven by an obsession for the efficiency, simplicity, and wealth offered by mass production, especially now after a year of being shut in our homes. Why bother cooking your own food when you can buy a frozen meal for half the price and a fraction of the time? Why wait six minutes for a made-from-scratch bagel when Einstein Bros. offers them in three? We live in a fast-moving world of maximizing profits and eliminating excess time. Even walking has become obsolete when we have the option at our fingertips to bike or scooter our way to a destination. And, after the devastation Covid-19 has wrought on the world, opening a restaurant seems like the last risky financial decision to dive into at a time like this.

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Scott is approaching this issue from a new angle, though. “The nickel isn’t what drives me,” he says, leaning back and looking up at the ceiling with a wistful glaze in his eyes. “I can’t sell myself out like that. For me, it’s all about doing it the right way. It’s teaching people skills. Everyone that works here now has a skill they never had before.”

           

He gestures to a young, curly-haired man measuring flour and water into large plastic bins behind the counter. “He can go off and bake whatever he wants now,” Scott says proudly. “He has a skill that he can take to another job, not just taking a frozen bagel out of a box and putting it in an oven. He understands the chemistry behind bread.”

           

These aren’t trivial skills, either. Since its door first opened, Gussy’s has been doing better than Scott anticipated. You don’t expect to make a profit in the first year or so, he explains. Instead, the goal is to build your reputation, to give customers an authentic and enjoyable dining experience, even though Gussy’s is just a bagel shop and not the five-star venues Scott has worked at before. His goal is to teach his employees to use the same level of care and skill that he employs in his own work, ultimately so that he can step back and let the business run itself.

           

“It’s awful,” he says with a laugh. “It’s a frightening feeling, stepping back. But you know what? I trust everyone here. I’ve given them everything I can to make them successful. The insanity that you have in this industry is control. It’ll make you mad. I have to let it go.”

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Scott still gets to experiment whenever he wants, though. He cures all the meats that go on Gussy’s sandwiches. He experiments with new twists and techniques. He gets to pass on his passion to new workers. He gets to make his own hours for once. “This is the happiest I’ve ever been in my life,” he says with a smile. “Baking the perfect bagel is no different than putting on a ten-course meal.”

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His most recent culinary challenge has been perfecting the recipe for the highly requested pizza bagel. He chuckles before launching into an explanation of the different aspects of what such a recipe entails, how each piece of the recipe needs to balance all the others.

 

The other day, says Scott, a nurse at one of the UPMC hospitals across the street from Scott's little shop stopped by on her lunch hour to tell him how great his bagels were. His eyes gleam with pride as he recalls the story. “Maybe the next two or three generations of classes here at Pitt will take their parents to Gussy’s because it’s a staple on campus,” he says with a wide smile. “That’s the goal. I can provide employment for people on campus forever. It’ll be this little shop that just keeps chugging.”

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In recent days, Scott hasn’t been behind the counter or in the back kitchen very often. Instead, his employees do everything he’s taught them to. A young woman fries scrambled eggs on Japanese omelet pans. A young man measures flour and water into the Hobart mixer. Sometimes, you can hear Scott’s hearty laugh in one of the booths as he talks to a customer or an old friend who has stopped by to visit. Other times, he’ll be in the back testing out new bagel recipes. There’s been a line at the register each day now, customers ordering and paying while others squeezed past with their brown paper bags sealed with a small strip of blue masking tape. For as long as people keep stopping by, Scott and his team will continue to bake bagels in the narrow little shop squeezed between two buildings, facing an uneven sidewalk and four lanes of bustling one-way traffic.