Rosenberg’s Bagels & Delicatessen Is on a Roll

Can you make a perfect bagel in Denver? That’s what Josh Pollack, a New Jersey native and University of Colorado grad, decided to find out. After leaving a job in finance in New York City, he studied the process at a vintage New Jersey deli, returned to Colorado to enroll at the Cook Street School of Fine Cooking, and fiddled with a couple of classic bagel recipes to create his own. The dough was better, but the real secret, he found, was in the water — and so he built a system to re-create New York City water. In the summer of 2014, he installed that system in Rosenberg’s Bagels and Deli, then opened the doors of his place to an immediate crush of crowds hungry for fish smoked on the premises, meats imported from New York — and what could be the perfect bagel, as Kristin Pazulski reports in “On a Roll,” now posted on Cafe Society.