Blue baker's apron; big, black-framed glasses; flour in his hair - in fact, flour pretty much everywhere - and a smile as big as Vermont, the US state where he grew up: this is the image of Julian Tavalin that recently appeared on a Beijing magazine cover.

The photo might give the sense that Tavalin is a passionate foodie, reveling in the moment as he pounds wholesome whole wheat dough toward its destiny as fresh-baked bagels.

"Are you kidding?" he says. "I'd been looking for a good bagel in Beijing - for me to eat!"

Tavalin Bagels was the answer to that need. It has now been going long enough to have momentum, but in the early days, bagels consumed him, rather than the other way around.

"Conceptualizing the work and doing it is completely different," he says. "You don't sleep. You don't do much else.

"I remember when we opened - sitting there, every day, looking across the street at the cigarette store and the DVD shop. I was bored out of my mind. Nobody came in. Nobody knew we were even there!" he says, laughing.

Then one day, an attractive young woman he'd seen before smoking outside the shop came into the street and turned not into the cigarette store but into the bagel shop.

"Do you have butter?" she asked.

"She had no idea what a bagel was," he says. "But I told her the butter was free."

He assured her that he wasn't giving her a pick-up line, that butter was free with a bagel for everyone.

Tavalin is still bright-eyed with excitement as he describes that encounter with "the mystery woman".

"She said 'thank you' and took her bagel and her butter and went away."

But she came back. It turned out she lived almost right above the shop.

"I was kind of new to Beijing and a little bit lonely at that time," says Anna Nasuta of Belarus. "I didn't have a lot of friends, so we talked a little bit. It started like that."

Earlier this spring, the two got married.

"If all else fails with the bagel company," Tavelin says, "I got what I wanted out of it!"

Tavelin came to China almost by accident.

"I'd never been anywhere, and I was living in a small town where nothing ever happens," he says.

There were some exchange students from Japan - some lived with his family - and he was excited to think they were his friends. At university he went looking for courses in Japanese culture, "but they were all focused on ancient stuff".

There was, however, a course on modern Chinese history, starting from 1911 and taught by a professor who had been to China in the 1980s. Tavalin was "immediately" hooked on the energy he could feel in the classroom.

"But the time I made my first trip to China in 2005 - a six-week language-credit program that would let me graduate early - I already knew I was ultimately going to live here," he says.

The bagels happened late one night, when Tavalin and a couple of friends in Beijing were surfing the Internet, eager to find "the thing" - the business opportunity most expats are sure they will find in China.

"We saw it was a niche that wasn't being served, and I know a good bagel when I see one," he says. "We tried a lot of recipes to get the bagels just right. And we use quality ingredients, which makes them a little expensive. But it makes all the difference."

Now the bagel business has settled into a routine - "everything that can go wrong has gone wrong enough times that our Chinese staff can handle routine problems" - he's working on a new project: an Internet TV show like those on YouTube.

"I've written the first season's scripts, built the sets, developed the characters, made the costumes, all that," he says, adding that he expects to start production in about six months.

"You know Beijing," he says with a grin. "As much as it can be crazy, it's just ripe with opportunities."

Contact the writers through michaelpeters@chinadaily.com.cn

Tavalin,a young American,finds his niche with a taste of home in Beijing. Photos by Cao Huan / China Daily

(China Daily 06/08/2014 page5)