Caitlin Parker of Firefly Cafe
Caitlin Parker opened Firefly Café in 2006, moving it to its current location a year later. But she says it never gets old when somebody calls one her bagels their favorite ever.
SCW: Why do your bagels look so weird?
CAITLIN PARKER: They’re all done by hand everyday. I don’t use a mixer at all. When you’re working that much energy into the yeast, they get super poofy and yummy. Then when I boil them, I boil them in a rice cooker. So they’re not just cooking. They’re also steaming. They do have a hole, but they grow in by the time they get baked. You don’t have cream cheese all over your leg that way.
Why did you expand the menu?
We do crazy bagel sandwiches right now. We have nine or ten different kinds. We just got to that point where we were ready to grow and wanted to do something creative. So we thought at Surfrider Café one night and bounced around a bunch of ideas. We got a French toast bagel and poutine bagel, which is covered in gravy. They’ve gotten crazy. It’s not your typical breakfast bagel.
Do you like Surfrider?
Yeah, we tend to go hang out there a lot after work, and have a lot of our employee meetings there. It’s good beer. Avocado fries are genius.
Is this the kind of place where someone can come in and say ‘I’d like my usual?’
Especially in our winter months, we know about 90 percent of our customers. We have our regulars’ wall, where if you’ve been a customer for an extended period of time, you have your own mug on the wall. Sometimes I know people’s regular stuff more than I know their actual names.There have definitely been times where I’ve been on the street and said, “Hey, white mocha guy!”
What drinks go best with a bagel?
I think the bitterness from a dark Italian roast tastes so delicious with a spicy jalapeno bagel with cream cheese.
The jalapeno flavor goes well with a creamy spread.
It’s kind of like a jalapeno popper.
Are there any bagel flavors you left behind?
The funniest one we tried was an Oreo bagel one time, and a Butterfinger bagel—a play on VooDoo Donuts [in Portland, Oregon]. They were adorable, and they tasted delicious, and I know that because I was the one who had to eat them because nobody wanted to buy them.
