Lines for Belle’s Bagels have formed down York Boulevard for roughly a decade with fans of the pop-up queuing at a music venue’s walk-up window, then on the patio of a shut-down bistro on York Boulevard, eager to tear into plump bagel sandwiches flush with eggs and schmear and tomato jam. But this month the lines for customers are lining up for the entirely new Belle’s Bagels, Delicatessen and Bar. The full-fledged, all-day deli and cocktail bar with pickle martinis and schnitzel blends Jewish-deli tradition with the modern and sometimes off-the-wall culinary concoctions of longtime friends and business partners Nick Schreiber and J.
D. Rocchio. “We both grew up in the Valley and in Jewish families eating this food, and the whole thing was important to us,” Rocchio said.
“We thought that would be cool, but it was never really a plan...
. There was a lot of spontaneous fermentation that happened.” “We started out a little half-sour, we ended up as full sours,” Schreiber joked.
Belle’s was born about a dozen years ago, when Rocchio and Schreiber — who’ve known each other since middle school — bemoaned the loss of some of their childhood-favorite bagel shops. It was mind-boggling that, years before L.A.
’s modern bagel boom , a dearth had formed in the city’s bagel scene. Schreiber, who’d worked at a Jewish deli during college in Boston, wondered how hard it could be. As it turned out, it was very, very hard.
He was constantly tweaking their bagel re.