After earning a degree in business administration, Adam Pomerantz ’90 worked long hours and earned promotions at Merrill Lynch, becoming a vice president after five years. But, his heart wasn’t in it: “I knew that one day I would want to have my own business,” he recalls. “What that business was, I had no idea.”

On weekends, he’d wait in line with dozens of other people at his tiny neighborhood bagel store. Clearly, this was a successful business, and Pomerantz, “who grew up eating lots of bagels and knowing the difference between a good bagel and a bad bagel,” was inspired to open his own shop.

After six years at Merrill Lynch, he quit to pursue his dream. He asked the equipment company he was working with to connect him with someone who knew how to make great bagels. That afternoon, he got a call from a man who owned a shop in New Jersey: “I heard what you want to do,” he said. “See you at 11.”

He meant 11 that night, so Pomerantz drove to the man’s shop and stayed until 6 or 7 a.m., learning how to hand-roll bagels and work the oven. He did that every night for more than a week. 

After securing a location in Greenwich Village and setting everything up, Pomerantz had a few weeks before opening to perfect the recipe. He tried several combinations before he created the bagel with the perfect amount of sweetness and the ideal texture.

When Murray’s Bagels, named after Pomerantz’s father, opened in 1996, it was clear the recipe was a winner. The shop has been extremely popular, earning a place on Eater’s and Time Out New York’s best bagels in New York City lists, among others. In 2007, Pomerantz opened Leo’s Bagels, named after his wife’s great uncle, in the Financial District. The stores have the same bagel recipe and the same menu, but Leo’s is much smaller. (That’s soon to change — Leo’s is almost tripling in size, with renovations expected to be complete by early fall.)

The biggest changes Pomerantz has seen over the years are a demand for “healthier” options and shifts to online ordering, hastened by the arrival of the pandemic. What hasn’t changed is what he enjoys about the work: “People walk into a bagel shop with a smile on their face,” he says. “They’re excited, pointing to the menu boards and talking to their friends. It’s really satisfying that they’re happy to be at my establishment.”

Part of what Abra Pappa ’97 does for a living is corporate wellness speaking and consulting. She recently delivered a presentation about how what you eat affects your mental health to a company with more than 800,000 employees.

“Being able to command the presence of a room and take complicated biochemical processes and break them down in a way that’s fun and engaging and interesting — I love that work,” says Pappa, who was a theatre major at Muhlenberg and who later earned a master’s in human nutrition and functional medicine. “It’s something I’m really good at.”

That type of work takes up about 25 to 30 percent of Pappa’s time. Sixty to 70 percent of her time is spent working individually with clients as a functional nutritionist. The rest of her time goes to Abra’s Kitchen, a food blog that attracts more than 1.5 million visitors per year.

When Pappa moved to New York City after graduating, she auditioned by day and worked in restaurants and bars by night, which took a toll on her physically. After seven or eight years, she completed a health coaching program and started cooking for clients with specific health conditions.

She wasn’t seeing the changes she hoped to see in those clients: “I was just delivering the goods,” she says. “I wasn’t helping the individuals learn how to feed themselves.” That’s a big focus of her private nutrition practice, which she launched in 2005. As she built that business, she attended lots of health and wellness fairs in the city, where she networked and began pitching herself as a corporate wellness speaker and consultant. In 2016, she launched Abra’s Kitchen to share the recipes she developed for her clients with a broader audience.

She hopes to continue growing that site to reach a broader audience and open up more opportunities to speak. This fall, she’s also launching a group consulting program to be more accessible to more people. Continuing to diversify her work is what keeps her engaged and interested.

 “I don’t think I’ve ever been the kind of person who is well suited for a deskbound job,” she says. “I have to be creating, working on multiple projects. That’s when I feel my best.”

Juan Martinez ’06 spent much of his childhood in the Dominican Republic, where hospitality is the top industry. He began working in restaurants at age 10, and at home, “My mother showed her love through food,” he says. “It was part of my upbringing.”

After earning a degree in business administration through the School of Continuing Studies, Martinez entered the banking industry. He knew that one day, he would start his own business, and the business he knew best was restaurants.

In 2010, he and his wife, Melanie, opened the State Cafe and Grill, and in 2011, they launched the first Don Juan Mex Grill, both in Easton. The early years were a struggle, and the couple wasn’t sure whether the businesses would survive. However, by 2016, Don Juan was running smoothly enough for Martinez to open another location in Emmaus. Today, there are five locations in the area. 

Before the pandemic, the plan had been to expand beyond the Lehigh Valley, but 2020 put the brakes on that idea. While labor shortages continue to be a challenge, conditions have stabilized enough for the Martinezes to launch a new venture. The first location of Melly Mel’s Chicken is slated to open this fall in Emmaus, and if that goes well, they will add locations. Once Martinez Hospitality has two strong brands, expansion outside the region will be back on the table.

As the existing restaurants thrive, Martinez most enjoys the opportunity to lead and mentor team members as they grow in their leadership roles. He’s also proud to invest in the community through initiatives like scholarship programs: “That right there makes me want to get up every day and do more ... When I was 16, I was that kid who got a little scholarship here and there. It helped me with my education,” Martinez says. “I’m a big believer in the power of education and giving back. Money comes and goes, but when you’re able to impact others without expecting anything in return, that’s a beautiful thing.”

At a farmer’s market this spring, a man bought a “dirty brownie” (a layer of chocolate chip cookies, a layer of Oreos and a layer of brownies) from Sarah Kauzmann ’16, the founder of Pipit’s Bakery. He told her that he was going to save it to share with his trivia night buddies. Fifteen minutes later he was back: He couldn’t wait to try the sweet treat, he ate it all himself and he wanted to buy more for his friends.

“That’s incredibly rewarding ... to see that immediate [reaction] of, ‘That was so good, I need more,’” Kauzmann says.

Kauzmann, a business administration major and a creative writing minor, grew up baking. She was inspired to start her own business after completing a master’s in entrepreneurship, but she wasn’t ready right away. Instead, she did marketing internships and spent a year baking at a Perkasie, Pennsylvania, shop. She learned to bake at scale, to make French macarons (now a specialty of hers) and much more.

By the end of 2019, she was working part-time for a monthly newspaper in central New Jersey and part-time as a pastry chef at a new cafe. That gig ended when the pandemic hit, and Kauzmann missed it: “COVID came and I thought, ‘Why am I waiting [to start my own business]?,’” she says. “‘I have enough experience now to do it.’”

In August 2020, Kauzmann began renting a commercial kitchen. She made a few appearances at the Perkasie Farmers Market, and that exposure along with word-of-mouth marketing helped Pipit’s Bakery (“Pipit” is Kauzmann’s father’s nickname for her) have a strong online-ordering showing for the 2020 holiday season.

Kauzmann spent 2021 as a regular vendor at the Perkasie Farmers Market, and this year, she’s added the Bethlehem Farmers Market as well. These in-person experiences are more fun, more profitable and less hassle than online ordering, which she’s moving away from this year. She’s hoping to add more wholesale clients as well as more clients who hire her to bake for large events in her quest to make this part-time passion into a full-time career.

“[My family laughs] every time I say, ‘I really want to bake something,’ after having just spent 10 hours baking,” Kauzmann says. “I just love it. It’s fun, rewarding and delicious.”

Bruno Wu ’07 grew up eating a variety of cuisines: His parents were born in China and emigrated to Brazil, where Wu lived until he was 10. Then, the family moved to New York’s Westchester County, and its proximity to New York City meant a world’s worth of restaurants and grocers were just a train ride away. He also grew up cooking: “By the time I was in high school, I was already making Beef Wellingtons and stuff like that for family dinners,” says Wu, who was a theatre major at Muhlenberg. 

His culinary training, which he completed in 2014 at The International Culinary School at The Art Institute of California, Los Angeles, covered many styles of cooking. Now, as a personal chef, if one of his clients has a menu request, there’s a good chance he’s made it professionally before.

He worked in a variety of restaurants in L.A. as he was trying to launch his acting career, both in the “front of the house” (as a host, busser, server and manager) and in the kitchen. “I found myself always getting promoted to managerial positions,” he recalls, but his passion was for the food. After earning an associate’s in culinary arts/chef training, he spent time working in six of the 10 Katsu-Ya Group restaurants in L.A. in a variety of roles.

Wu is now based in Sarasota, Florida, where he relocated with his wife, Rachel Silber Wu ’10, in 2020 to be closer to her parents and to get a break from city life after a decade in L.A. He had launched a personal chef business in L.A. in 2017, but he didn’t get enough bookings to do it full-time. Sarasota, he says, has “a better-situated demographic and location for that business. A lot of people come down to Sarasota for their yearly vacations … I can be a bigger fish in a smaller pond.”

He launched his business in Florida in the beginning of 2021 and has since tripled or quadrupled his bookings. The bulk of his work is private dinners, where he’ll go to a client’s home and cook for a group. He also has some clients who have him prepare a week’s worth of meals for them to reheat and eat. 

He’s mostly a one-man show: He responds to inquiries and schedules calls to discuss menus; keeps his own books; and shops for, preps, cooks and serves the food. He’ll bring on a server for events with more than 14 or 15 people and a sous chef for events with more than 20. He hasn’t had to do much in the way of marketing — word-of-mouth and positive Yelp reviews have kept him plenty busy. There were a couple weeks in April when he was booked every day, night or both. He would like to get to a point where he’s booked five to six nights a week for 48 to 49 weeks out of the year — an attainable goal given how much he’s already exceeded his expectations for 2022.

“I’m at my best when I’m put under pressure,” Wu says. “My days are long, but I get to have a personal connection with my clients, with the people actually eating my food. In a restaurant, I never had that experience. When I was front-of-house, I had more experience with [diners] but I wasn’t connected with the food that much. This business is a really neat way for me to be able to share my passion for food with the people enjoying it.”