Fargo chef on her perfect bagel, meshing Nordic-Jewish fare and her new cookbook
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When Andrea Baumgardner opened BernBaum’s in downtown Fargo in 2016, she was inspired by classic lunch counter delis, like B&H Dairy in New York City.
The result: a low-frills deli combining her Nordic and German roots with her husband’s Jewish background.
“And then we did see the Venn diagram,” Baumgardner said — one that included smoked fish, pickles, and lamb. “It was, in a way, sort of a lucky thought experiment.”
As chef, she racked up James Beard nominations and plenty of regular customers before closing the restaurant abruptly in 2024.
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Now, the new cookbook “BernBaum's: Recipes from Fargo's Scandinavian-Jewish Deli” memorializes the restaurant’s most iconic recipes.
MPR News host Clay Masters spoke with Baumgardner about her ideal bagel, meshing Jewish and Nordic fare.
Press play above to listen to their conversation, or read a transcript below, edited for clarity.
When many people think of a Jewish deli, they’re expecting really good bagels. There’s a myth, though, that you can’t find a good bagel outside the East Coast. But yours even got kudos from the New York Times back in 2022. What makes the perfect bagel?
Bagels originally were a street food, and they were sold on dowels in Eastern Europe from bagel peddlers. I think what makes a good bagel is dough that is able to stand up to boiling — pretty substantial dough. I like a fairly hardy interior. It's not light and fluffy. My mother-in-law says, if you have to hit on your chest to get it down your throat, that’s a good bagel.
What’s your favorite recipe in this book?
That’s hard. That’s like choosing your favorite child. The Icelandic donuts really remind me of my grandma Effie. And then even the chicken salad recipe is my adaptation of a recipe I was taught by a family friend. It’s based on a Circassian chicken recipe.
We called it chicken walnut salad, and we poached the chickens, and then we would take the meat off of the chickens, and chop it up for a chicken salad. But it also has scallion, a little bit of shallot. But the thing that I think makes it really interesting, and made it addictive for me, is that we ground the walnuts with cumin, smoked paprika and garlic. You grind it into kind of a corn meal, and then you mix that in with the chicken, and it turns it an orange color.
And then there’s a little bit of mayo and yogurt and lemon juice. It was a real favorite, I have to say. In fact, I’ve gotten more than one email where people have said, “I’m only going to buy this book if there’s chicken salad.”
The restaurant closed in 2024, not long after you were nominated for the James Beard award for Best Chef of the Midwest. What was that like? Do you miss the day-to-day buzz of the business?
Closing was, I guess I’ll speak for myself, but it was, for me, a real grief process, because a lot of my community connection is through working in a restaurant in Fargo, and there are a lot of people I do feel connected to who we don’t know each other's phone numbers, or we maybe don’t even know each other's names, but I might know, even now, if I see them in Hornbacher’s, I might know what they ordered. Generally, I didn’t realize until it was gone what an enormous connection, or tether, that was for me.
