Get Out of Town | Bodo's Bagels is a Charlottesville, VA Institution | Episode 6

LAURITA: Bodo's Bagels.

LAUREN: Bodo's!

LAURITA: A students staple.

SCOTT: Bodo's Bagels, the thing to say about us is that it's an institution to call us a local institution.

We do an enormous amount of business, which we're very grateful to be able to do.

We bake at each of the stores somewhere between three and 5,000 bagels a day.

LAURITA: So I'm going to get a plain bagel with lox cream cheese.

LAUREN: And then can I do a cinnamon raisin bagel?

SCOTT: Yeah.

We're the cliche place that everybody brings their friend when they come to town.

The bagels that we make are New York style bagels and the recipes that we're using now are 40-year-old recipes.

The biggest departure for us from the traditional New York bagel is that ours is a little bit smaller so that you could have it as a sandwich and not have the sandwich be an overwhelming mass of food.

Making bagels is a two-day process.

The bagels that we're baking for customers today, we started yesterday as dough from scratch.

We do 100 pound batches of dough.

We do usually something like seven or eight batches a day.

LAUREN: The cream cheese is really good.

Do they make the cream cheese here?

LAURITA: They make all their cream cheeses.

That's why I got a combination of the olive and the herb.

LAUREN: Mm-hmm.

LAURITA: I wanted to taste both.

LAUREN: Mm-hmm.

SCOTT: We started in 1988 with the store on Emmett Street, which is sort of the main drag that runs through Charlottesville.

People immediately were really interested.

It was popular almost from the get-go.

We serve breakfast, lunch, and dinner at all the stores.

We have people who come in literally for every meal.

So we get built into people's lives in a particular way.

That's a really gratifying thing to be able to do for people.

One of the things that's been true about Charlottesville for a long time, we've always had the most, or the second most restaurants per capita in the country.

That food scene is really heavily dominated by local businesses.

LAURITA: Usually I would get Bodo's down on The Corner and so I'm going to take you down to The Corner today.

The Corner is like... LAUREN: The spot.

LAURITA: The spot where... LAUREN: Where the haps.

LAURITA: Where the students go and get their like their t-shirts, like fast food.

It's kind of like the hangout spot.

BRANTLEY: As we talk about the city of Charlottesville, you can really think about it in three separate little chunks.

You've got the downtown mall, which is all pedestrian.

It's eight blocks.

That's where you're going to find those boutique shops, the restaurants, the coffee shops, bookstores, et cetera.

So as you stay on West Main Street, continuing to go west, that's when you'll run into the University of Virginia and what's called The Corner District, which is the district of shops and restaurants that's located right around the University of Virginia.

LAURITA: Okay, so we are walking on my alma mater, because I wanted to show Lauren the Rotunda because everybody should take a picture at the Rotunda when they come on campus.

LAUREN: It's like a must see when you're here.

So, I'm going to turn the camera, see it.

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