Riddle me this: What’s black and white and bread all over?
Answer: the newspaper-themed wrappers at Enjoy Bagels + Sweets of course.
There’s an intentionally urban feel to this hidden gem in Buellton, tucked away behind the corner of an O’Reilly Auto Parts on Highway 246.
“It’s absolutely perfect for a New York-style bagel shop,” said owner Kevin Vander Vliet, while waving his hand at the shop’s industrial surroundings, pointing out the shipping containers and dumpsters in the parking lot. “I want people to feel like they found us in an alley in New York.”
Vander Vliet co-owns the eatery with his wife, Amber. The Santa Ynez-based couple is probably best known locally for Enjoy Cupcakes, their bakery and catering service they co-founded in 2009. Enjoy Bagels + Sweets opened in 2020, but the duo has occupied its location space since about 2011, Vander Vliet explained.
The facility’s graduation into a full-blown eatery (complete with a small patio and bar for outdoor seating) was one of pomp and happenstance.
“The funny thing for me is when I started, I was just making bagels for myself and I was getting good results, and I think that was just by pure luck,” Vander Vliet said, who would boil and bake his own bagels as a hobby before opening the shop.
“I didn’t go to any kind of bread school, I didn’t go to culinary school; this is all definitely by trial and error,” he added.
Vander Vliet also feels fortunate that he and his wife were able to open the shop during such a turbulent year. The first pandemic shutdown last March is what inspired Vander Vliet to take the bagel leap in the first place, he explained.
“When COVID shut everything down, it put us essentially out of business,” Vander Vliet said, referring to Enjoy Cupcakes’ heavy reliance on catered events. “All weddings were basically canceled or postponed. And both shops shut down,” he said, referring to Saarloos and Sons and the Santa Barbara Public Market, where the couple also operated.
“Me and my wife were freaking out like everyone else was at that time,” he continued. “We didn’t know what to do, and we have two kids, so we were pretty scared.”
The couple brainstormed options and decided to offer free home deliveries once a week as an incentive for customers. They advertised the offer over Facebook and, nearly on a whim, Vander Vliet decided to include a photo of some of the homemade bagels he’d been making for himself at the time.
“Amber came up to me a couple hours later [after the Facebook post] and she was like, ‘Hey you know there’s a lot of orders coming in for your bagels,’” Vander Vliet said. “And I was like, ‘Oh, great, great, keep ’em coming. No big deal.’”
Within hours of the Facebook post, orders had been placed for a combined total of about 600 bagels.
“I stayed up for two days, completely all the way through the morning, through the next night. It was very painful,” Vander Vliet said, recalling that first wave of bagel orders. “But that’s how this all started. It was a 100 percent crash course into bagel making at a level I wasn’t used to.”
Back before occupying their commercial space, the couple ran Enjoy Cupcakes from their own home kitchen, baking goodies for deliveries and events—including the popular cupcake and wine pairing event at Saarloos and Sons in Los Olivos.
“There was originally no intention to ever open this as a retail location,” said Vander Vliet, as he and his wife have used the space as their baking facility for Enjoy Cupcakes over the past nine years. “At the time [of seeking the facility], we didn’t care about having any kind of retail presence—like being seen on the road or wherever customers were. We just wanted a quiet kitchen.”
Now their kitchen is overflowing with abundant sweet and savory baked goods.
Aside from the traditional bagels you would come to expect from a shop of this caliber (plain bagels, sesame bagels, everything bagels, etc.), Enjoy Bagels + Sweets also offers a selection of specialty bagels including a pepperoni pizza bagel (with smoked bacon) and a jalapeño cheddar bagel (the latter is Vander Vliet’s personal favorite).
A warning to the indecisive: The shop’s menu also features a wide variety of bagel sandwiches, or bagel-wiches, to choose from, including the Goldie LOX (an everything bagel with green olive schmear; sliced, smoked salmon; and more), the Benedict (a scooped-out cheese bagel with a seasoned egg wrapped in Canadian bacon), and Veggin’ Out (a plain bagel with sun-dried tomato rosemary schmear, thin sliced cucumber, sprouts, and sun-dried tomatoes).
With “sweets” in the eatery’s title as well, the shop also offers a variety of desserts alongside its bagel and bagel-wich selection, including cupcake flights, cheesecake, cookies (and “cookie-wiches”), and muffins.
There’s also a rotating special at Enjoy Bagels + Sweets that changes from week to week, usually available for that week alone.
“It’s been fun coming up with different concoctions every week,” Vander Vliet said, discussing his latest creation, The Boujee Piggy (stuffed with bacon, prosciutto, Black Forest ham, onions, melted brie cheese, and apricot spread). “I’ve tried to build a menu that speaks to everyone.”
Arts Editor Caleb Wiseblood is breaking bread at cwiseblood@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Mar 18-25, 2021.