A world of bagels

Although alumna Katie Pollom graduated from IU in 2005 and now lives in St. Louis, she can still be found sealed onto a table top at Bloomington Bagel Company holding a bagel on top of a Michigan ski slope.

Pollom said she loved Bloomington Bagel Company since seeing the pictures on the wall for the first time.

“The owner told me that if I went and took a bagel with me, I would have one too,” she said.

But Pollom’s picture is only one of an entire collection that has become a trademark tradition at the Bloomington Bagel Company stores on Dunn Street, Morton Street and now at the Shoppes on the East Side.

During its 13 years of operation, the Bloomington Bagel Company has collected pictures of its customers and their bagels from around the world.

Each table in the stores is decorated with a variety of different pictures, but what they all have in common is the presence of one, most likely stale, bagel from the store.

Suzanne Aquila, president and owner of Bloomington Bagel Company, said she was inspired after seeing another restaurant do something similar.

“I thought, well, in the Bloomington community, we really are all over the world,” she said. “Wouldn’t it be fun to track where everybody goes, but also see how we all change through the years?”

To submit photos, customers must use bagels from the store, and the picture can’t be taken in Indiana, Aquila said. Whenever a customer submits a photo, they receive a dozen bagels for free.

The pictures are then sealed onto tables made by a local Bloomington artist and placed in all three stores.

Aquila said there are pictures of people holding their bagels in China, and even a photo of two pilots holding up a bagel inside an airplane cockpit in mid-flight.

“One of the most popular photos happens to be a woman who’s topless on a beach and strategically places her arm over her chest, so people fight over that table,” she said.

Susan Williams, director of University Communications, has pictures in the store from trips to Washington and Italy.

“We have a group of friends we travel with, and we go to the Bloomington Bagel Company every Saturday,” she said. “We have traveled

together to various places, and if we go somewhere new now, we always try to take a bagel and get a photograph.”

Williams also said the photos represent something more than simply smiling faces of people holding bagels starring back at customers.

“I go in there and I look at all those pictures, and it just reminds me of what a remarkable place Bloomington is to live in,” Williams said. “Its kind of a microcosm in that there are so many interesting people from all over the world here, and I think for me, that’s what those photographs emphasize. It represents why I love Bloomington.”

For Pollom, her Michigan ski trip picture provides a lasting legacy in Bloomington, especially now that her sister is starting her freshman year at IU and will be able to go to Bloomington Bagel Company.

“Anytime that I’d have a family member come visit, we’d always sit at the table with our picture on it,” Pollom said.

With each start to the fall semester, Aquila said she usually expects a significant wave of pictures to come from customers who traveled during the summer.

However, she said she is interested to see how many pictures she’ll receive this year since the economy prevented many people from taking extensive vacations.

“It will be interesting because financially, it’s been a lot harder for people to travel this summer, so we’ll see less pictures, or maybe not as many exotic ones,” she said. “It depends on how the economy affects people.”

Regardless, Aquila said she is proud of the effect the pictures in her stores have on the sense of community around Bloomington, while creating six degrees of separation worldwide.

“I had an amazing experience where I ran a race in another city, and I had something from BBC on me, and someone came up to me and said ‘I love Bloomington Bagel!’” she said.

Pollom said she agrees with the idea that the pictures have created the incredible sense of a global community.

“I think that a bagel is something that’s a little out of the ordinary in so many places in the world,” she said. “It’s cool to see the bagel in front of various world monuments, and it has kind of created a sense of community inside that store.”