Family Style Food Festival is finally back, after more than two years away, and we couldn’t be more excited. Not only does it give us a chance to shine a light on our favorite restaurants and chefs from the Los Angeles area but also fly in some of the most legendary eateries in the world. At the inaugural Family Style in 2019, festival-goers had the unique opportunity to eat Katz’s Deli pastrami sandwiches from the Big Apple and chicken yakitori from Hong Kong’s famous Yardbird, all while standing on Fairfax.

This year, we knew we had to go even bigger. Aside from LA’s best like Jon & Vinny’s and Felix Trattoria, we’re bringing in heavy hitters from coast to coast to wow your tastebuds. Action Bronson is coming from Queens to chef it up with Uncle Paulie’s. Truth BBQ is making the trip from Texas. Half Evil is bringing their critically-acclaimed Three House restaurant to the block. We could go on and on but that would be ignoring the doughy, round, perfectly baked, and seeded elephant in the room.

We’re bringing another century-old New York City staple to Family Style this year, and they’re the headliner of all headliners. Since 1914, when their first brick-and-mortar store opened on Orchard Street in the Lower East Side, Russ & Daughters has provided generations upon generations of New Yorkers with the fuel for their family functions, the bread to break around their tables, and memories to last a lifetime.

While what they do may seem simple to some, the Russ family has perfected a craft that countless others have strived to imitate and simply cannot. The perfect bagel, topped with world-class smoked fish, luscious cream cheese, and the freshest veggies. A Russ & Daughters sandwich is what dreams are made of.

But it’s more than a bagel with lox, shmear, onion, tomato, and capers. Russ & Daughters is a trailblazer in the food world and American business as a whole. After successfully growing the business from a pushcart to a successful storefront, Polish immigrant Joel Russ knew he had to come up with a succession plan. Joel had no sons, however, so he convinced coerced his three daughters Hattie, Ida, and Anne to help him run the shop. Though it aptly described the nature of the business, the new Russ & Daughters was the first business in American history to bear the name “& Daughters” instead of sons. Joel was a trailblazer in the feminist movement and didn’t even know it. He just needed a lot of help making a lot of bagels.

And for four generations, this beloved bagel spot has been passed down throughout the Russ family tree, a feat that less than one percent of businesses in American history have accomplished. Now run by cousins Niki Russ Federman and Josh Russ Tupper, Russ & Daughters has become as much a New York institution as Broadway, Yankee Stadium, and Central Park, cemented on even the shortest list of must-visit spots in the city.

Before the Russ & Daughters team embarks on their cross-country journey to serve their famous sandwiches (and black and white cookies!!) in Los Angeles for one day only, I caught up with Niki Russ Federman to chat about bagels (duh), her family’s legacy, and balancing tradition with technology.

DUKE LONDON: Hi! How are you? And where are you, in a factory?
NIKI RUSS FEDERMAN: Hi, so I’m in our Brooklyn spot, where our bakery is. This is where we ship from, and our offices are here.

How many bagels do you guys bake a day in that facility?
On average, probably 300 dozen a day. But then, you know, when it’s busy, it can go up to like, 700 or 800. Yeah, it’s an around-the-clock situation here.

What did you have for breakfast today?
I mean my I literally eat a bagel a day. My morning routine is walking into our bakery and then I’ll sort of check-in with everyone and make the rounds in our different kitchens and shipping department. And then I’ll pull a bagel just to see how the bagels are, you know? Most days I just rip a bagel off the line but some days if I’m more civilized, I’ll do cream cheese. Sometimes I’ll put on some smoked salmon, just depending on what I’m craving that day or I haven’t tried in a while.

How many different kinds of bagels do you make?
We make 13 different bagels. And then we make bialys, which are the underappreciated stepsister of a bagel, and they really deserve much more love.

I rewatched Sopranos during the pandemic, and there were all these foods I heard about on there that I need to try. One of them was bialys.
We didn’t realize bialys figured into The Sopranos.

That’s Tony’s breakfast every morning!
Oh, get out! Well, I am your bialy source. We make amazing bialys. It’s fun, we’re one of the few keepers of the bialy tradition. So I will convert you to bialys.

I was talking to Ben Hundreds about Russ & Daughters and he talks about it as if it’s a family member. He told me he gets whitefish salad, bagel and lox, and latkes. Good order?
That’s a good order. I approve of that order. I mean, he’s missing something sweet, like babka or a black and white, but I’m on the fish side of things, too.

Are you pro or anti-toasting?
I am anti toasting if it’s a same-day bagel. I am pro-toasting if it’s the day after.

It’s surprising you would ever have to eat a day-old bagel.
Yeah, it’s only if I travel somewhere. And if I go visit someone, then of course I have to bring the bagels and lox and the whole spread because I won’t be welcomed if I don’t. [Laughs] And then if it’s the next day, whatever, we’ll toast but yeah, otherwise I don’t.

What’s the craziest place you’ve had to bring a spread?
Oh, I’ve brought bagels everywhere. And our customers do, too. We have our customers taking our bagels to far-flung places, packing them in suitcases and bringing them to the Philippines and Hong Kong, etc. We’ve sent them to Iraq, to a military base there.

Russ & Daughters is so important to so many people.
Some of the most memorable times that we spend with our families are around food and the food that we grow up eating. We associate that food with family. So I think Russ & Daughters, in that sense,  has become an extended member of people’s families. And the fact that the original store is still there on the Lower East Side, over 100 years later, is amazing. My cousin Josh and I are the fourth generation of the family to run this place. It’s been held by one family, owned and run and protected by one family means that we have four generations worth of relationships with other families, so it runs deep, the way people feel about this place and the food.

So many restaurants in the industry were hit hard during the pandemic, and many didn’t make it. What kind of challenges did you guys face and how have you survived?
I mean, it was definitely the most stressful thing I’ve ever experienced. We went from being a business that employs 162 people to being down to 50 people. You know, we had two restaurants that were shut down. And we went from being a business always thinking about how Russ & Daughters would be around for another 100 years to some months having to project out how many months we had left. And that’s a position I never thought we would be in. But what was really amazing was what you described, the way people feel about Russ & Daughters, like their family. There’s this bond that goes both ways. I felt obligated to keep Russ & Daughters going no matter what sacrifices or hardships came along. And also I have perspective because my great grandfather, Joel Russ, went through the Spanish Flu pandemic in 1918. Each generation of my family has had to protect Russ & Daughters through World Wars and Great Depressions and recessions and 9/11, so it was sort of like okay, this is our generation’s big challenge. At the same time, I think our customers and the public just rallied behind us so intensely. Because everything was falling apart and people needed to feel like some things were still going to be there for them and stay the same.

Will Russ & Daughters come out of this whole ordeal stronger than ever?
I would say we came out of it stronger. You know, we still aren’t over COVID and I still have one restaurant that’s totally closed. But you know, I think it just anchored us even more, like rooted us even more to New York and to our customers, people who just care about food and food culture.

As the fourth generation of Russ family members to run this amazing restaurant and company, how do you weigh innovation versus tradition? It must be tough to balance new ideas against what has worked for over 100 years.
This is a conversation my cousin Josh and I are always having, between tradition and innovation. So anytime we do something new, we’re always trying to do both things at the same time. And it’s sort of contradictory, right, preserving tradition but then also moving it forward. Change can’t come at the expense of history. People have such a long-standing connection to Russ & Daughters, so it kind of keeps us in check. Because we know it has to feel right to the public, our customers. I have customers who have literally been coming to us for over 80 years or they’re the third or fourth generation in their family to eat at Russ & Daughters, so they rely on us to be this anchor and feel the same even if we’re doing something new. For me, that’s one of the most fascinating creative challenges of running Russ & Daughters, balancing those two things.

That’s one of the things I’m most fascinated with in food culture right now, is branding and customer loyalty. You see it with the explosion of food merch, people wearing hats from restaurants 3000 miles away. And that’s why Family Style is so cool, it celebrates that intense love of these restaurants. It’s beyond the food. It’s more about the fact that Russ & Daughters has brought so many people together for so many years. There are countless families in New York and around the world who, at every important moment where they have gathered in the past 50, 60, 70, 80 years, they’ve probably eaten Russ & Daughters.
I love seeing the way that people own Russ & Daughters from all walks of life. Food is one of the few ways you can actually taste a place. Most cities and towns now have all the same stores and all this access to all the same things and experiences for the most part. But food is one of those quintessential experiences of a place that’s open to anybody who’s just curious to try it. And I love seeing people come to Russ & Daughters for the first time from all over the world and they’ve just read somewhere or were told you have to go to Russ & Daughters, this is New York. And at first, they don’t know how to order. They don’t know how it works. I forget that some people think that putting fish on a bagel is a weird thing. And then you see the way they bite into that bagel, or they have a black and white, then they get it and it becomes their place, too. And the fact that we’re doing a collaboration with The Hundreds, right? That speaks to this whole other new generation and everyone can put their own spin on it but still own it.

Even though it was started by your great grandfather, Russ & Daughters has largely been run by women throughout the company’s history. In an industry that is dominated by men, what kind of challenges did that present? And why has it made Russ & Daughters so special?
It’s true, this is the first business in this country that’s called “& Daughters.” And my great grandfather was totally pioneering and some people thought it was crazy and offensive but then my father ran the business with my mom, and now back to me and Josh so I mean it hasn’t totally been all run by women but the female presence is very strong and I do feel proud to have chosen to follow in the footsteps of my grandmother and her sisters because they didn’t have a choice. They were a poor Jewish family and this is what you this is just what they were expected to do, that’s how the family survived. In my case, I chose to do this.

What makes a Russ & Daughters bagel the best in the world?
Well, so here’s the thing. We have always held on to preserving what is a real New York bagel and even when we were swimming against the current because we have maintained that a bagel should be smaller and have that hard crust, that it’s an artisanal product. But bagels sort of became this mass-produced thing. Unfortunately, New York is famous for bagels but the bagel scene got kind of bad. They kind of got worked into this commercial product that was huge and sweet and you still see it all over. We always countered that and refuse to give into that because we know what a real bagel is. And a bagel was also meant to be the vehicle for cream cheese and the lox, it’s not supposed to be like the end-all be-all. It’s just the platform, just the canvas. At Russ & Daughters, it takes us nearly two days to make our bagels because we don’t cut any corners and it’s a long process. We use the best quality flour, not bromated. We don’t have any sponges or accelerants, so you have to proof the bagels and allow the yeast to activate and then you have to retard the bagels which is basically cooling them. And that takes between 12 and 24 hours and then you boil them and then you bake them. So, one bagel is a two-day process. And we use traditional wooden boards like planks with a burlap runner on top. And that’s how we bake the bagels. So the bagels go on top of these boards, they get seeded and then they go in the oven and then they get finished, we flip them off the boards and then they sit on the stone of the oven to finish the bake. So it’s a process. We’re always holding up the work and see ourselves as the torchbearers of what a true bagel should be.