“I grew up filming my friends and everything like that,” he says. “Once I got the team manager job, it was like that on overdrive.”
Traveling to film, especially with international athletes, came to a halt during the pandemic. Grounded, Chadwick shifted to remote editing and started exploring other interests. He tried his hand at baking, first making bread and then his favorite breakfast food: bagels.
To say Chadwick enjoys bagels is an understatement. Barring some occasional breaks, he estimates he’s had a bagel and an iced coffee for breakfast every day for more than a decade. That ritual sparked a curiosity that “just got the better of me,” he says.
Each batch of hand-rolled, boiled and baked rounds ignited the same kind of drive Chadwick felt when he first discovered BMX.
“I wonder if I can make the bagel that I would want to encompass all the other bagels that I had eaten?” Chadwick recalled thinking as he continued to bake and moved from yeast to sourdough.
At the urging of friends and family who were his first taste testers, Chadwick took the leap to start selling his sourdough bagels. He launched Bagelwick in 2023, using the same surname-addended nickname he uses for his video business, Filmwick Productions. He took a hiatus to focus on some video projects and returned to baking in fall 2024. Although Chadwick doesn’t have any formal culinary training, he’s had a lifetime of devouring bagels – from picking up standard rounds from grocery store cases to stopping at renowned spots like Los Angeles’ Courage Bagels while traveling with his BMX team. Riding also made him persistent.
“It’s just this DIY mindset of just go for it and if you fall, you just get back up and send it again, and you just keep doing it until you get it. That’s kind of how I approached this whole thing,” Chadwick says.
His bagel ingredients are simple – flour, water, salt, barley malt syrup and sourdough starter. Bagelwick bagels are slowly fermented over nearly 36 hours, then hand-rolled.
“I want a light, airy bagel with a crispy shell that is not super dense but not, not chewy. You know, bagels gotta have chew,” he says. “It's gotta have a little bit of sweetness. I like a little bit of the tang from the sourdough.”
When he thinks back to before the pandemic, Chadwick says he couldn’t find the kinds of bagels he wanted in Phoenix that he could eat on his travels. Since then, the Valley has undergone a bagel renaissance, led by Bagelfeld's and grown by Bagelero, Don Guerra, Bagel Daddies and others. That growing group made Chadwick realize baking bagels is “a viable option.”
Bagelwick's bagels are naturally leavened. "I like a little bit of the tang from the sourdough," says owner Ryan Chadwick.
Spenser Lee
Those pre-orders open on Mondays, with pickup at The Kitchen’s Market on Saturday mornings. Any extra bagels that aren’t reserved, which he calls “loosies,” are also available then on a first-come, first-served basis.
Sometimes those loosies don’t last his customers’ commute.
“When people tell me they had one in the car while they were driving home, that's the ultimate compliment,” he says.
Right now, Chadwick is exploring partnerships to get his bagels in some local coffee shops and restaurants. In time, he hopes to open his own brick-and-mortar location where he can again be part of a team.
“That's one thing I learned as a BMX team manager is I love taking care of a team. I love helping people,” he says. “I experienced my dream job, I’m just trying to find the next thing that makes me happy.”
Bagelwick
Available Saturdays, 8 to 11 a.m.2655 W. Guadalupe Road, #13, Mesa
