He Came to Calgary from Israel to Study Engineering. He Turned Down a Finance Job and Became a Baker Instead. Calgary Got the Better Deal.
Aviv Fried arrived at the University of Calgary in 1999 knowing nothing about bread. By 2010 he had opened Sidewalk Citizen Bakery on 1A Street. By 2015 he had moved into Calgary's historic Simmons Building, named the bakery after Jane Jacobs, and was employing more than 40 people to make organic sourdough, babka, and shakshuka that the city had never had before.
August 11, 2026 · By Justin Plosz · Calgary, Alberta · Business · 7 min read read
The Finance Job He Turned Down
In 1999, Aviv Fried arrived in Calgary from just outside Tel Aviv to study at the University of Calgary. He was an engineering student. He had grown up in Israel, had come to Canada to get an education, and had no particular attachment to baking — he had never made a loaf of bread in his life.
He graduated. A job offer arrived. Finance, reasonable salary, the predictable trajectory of an engineering graduate who had done what he was supposed to do. He came very close to taking it.
Instead, he became a baker.
The decision was not impulsive. Fried had spent years noticing something about food in Calgary: the city was large, economically robust, and growing fast, but its food culture was still developing in ways that left certain things conspicuously absent. The sourdough he had grown up eating in Israel — dense, fermented, its flavour a product of time and temperature and the specific microflora of a particular bakery — didn't exist in Calgary in the form he knew it. The same was true of the pastries and prepared foods that form the quiet background of everyday life in Israeli cities: babka, shakshuka, labneh, foods that are unremarkable in Tel Aviv and completely unknown in most of Western Canada.
He saw a gap. He filled it, not because he had business experience in bakeries, but because he had the knowledge of a person who had grown up eating well and paid attention to what was on the table.
Starting With a Bicycle
Sidewalk Citizen did not begin with a storefront. It began with a bicycle and a bread route.
Fried launched the bakery as a one-man delivery operation: baking each day, loading the bread onto a bike, and distributing it to a small and growing list of customers and businesses around Calgary. The bicycle delivery model was logistical necessity but also, in retrospect, perfectly aligned with the philosophy he was building toward — a bakery that thought of itself as part of the urban fabric rather than apart from it.
Delivering bread by bicycle teaches you a city differently than driving it teaches you. You learn which streets are actually busy at which hours, where the neighbourhoods connect and where they don't, which businesses have the kind of loyal daily customer base that a bread route depends on. Fried learned Calgary the slow way, from the front of a bicycle, in the wind and cold that make delivery cycling in Alberta a non-trivial commitment.
The bread route grew. Word spread, as it does when someone is making something that isn't available anywhere else in the city. The customer list expanded from individuals to restaurants to specialty food shops. By 2010, the operation had outgrown what a bicycle and a home kitchen could sustain. It was time for a real address.
Why Jane Jacobs?
The name Sidewalk Citizen is a direct reference to Jane Jacobs — the urbanist, writer, and activist whose 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities remains the most influential work on urban planning written in the twentieth century. Jacobs argued against the prevailing planning consensus of her era, which favoured superhighways, tower blocks, urban renewal, and the segregation of functions across large areas of a city. Against all of that, she proposed the opposite: density, mixed use, short blocks, old buildings, and the complexity of ordinary street life.
At the centre of her analysis was what she called the 'sidewalk ballet' — the daily choreography of pedestrians, shopkeepers, children, and neighbours that makes a street feel alive and safe and worth living on. The sidewalk citizen is the person who participates in this ballet: who knows their block, who makes eye contact, who is present in the public life of the street.
Fried named his bakery after this idea because the bakery was supposed to be that kind of place: a neighbourhood institution that contributes to the life of the street rather than extracting from it, that makes its block better by being there. A place where people come not just to buy bread but to be part of something — a community, a morning ritual, a shared table.
It is an unusual thing to name a business after a philosopher of cities, but in hindsight it is the most precise description of what Sidewalk Citizen has become.
From 1A Street to the Simmons Building
Sidewalk Citizen's first retail location opened in 2010 on 1A Street in Calgary. It was also, for many years, findable inside Sunnyside Natural Market, where the bakery operated a counter from 2010 through 2022.
In 2015, the bakery moved into the Simmons Building in Calgary's East Village — and this is where the story becomes architectural. The Simmons Building is one of the most significant industrial heritage buildings in Calgary's downtown core. Built in 1912 as a mattress factory — originally the Simmons Bedding Company — it survived the 2013 floods that devastated the East Village and, rather than being demolished, became a centrepiece of the neighbourhood's rehabilitation. The building was restored and repurposed as a food and culture hub, with Sidewalk Citizen as its anchor tenant alongside a craft brewery.
The East Village itself had been one of Calgary's most troubled urban areas for decades — underinvested, isolated by infrastructure, and cut off from the rest of downtown by the CP Rail corridor. The city invested heavily in its revival following the 2013 floods, and the Simmons Building became the physical and symbolic centre of that effort. A bakery that named itself after Jane Jacobs ended up in exactly the kind of place Jane Jacobs wrote about: a preserved industrial building in a neighbourhood being knitted back together by food, culture, and the daily life of people who walk to it.
Babka, Shakshuka, and the Tzavta Salon
When Sidewalk Citizen first brought babka to Calgary, the response from longtime Calgarians was often the same: they had never heard of it. This was not unusual. Babka — a braided enriched bread laced with chocolate, cinnamon, or other fillings — is a staple of Ashkenazi Jewish baking tradition, widely available in New York, Montreal, and Toronto but essentially unknown in Western Canada before Fried introduced it.
The same was true of shakshuka — the North African and Middle Eastern dish of eggs poached in a spiced tomato sauce — and of labneh, the strained yogurt common across the Levant. These foods required no justification in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, or Haifa. In Calgary, they were revelations.
Fried did not set out to be an ambassador for Israeli food culture. He set out to make the food he knew how to make and that he believed people in Calgary would enjoy. The fact that this food happened to be unfamiliar to most Western Canadians turned out to be an asset: Sidewalk Citizen was not competing with other versions of these things. It was the first version, which gave it a monopoly on the memory of the first time someone in Calgary tasted fresh babka.
In January 2016, the bakery launched Tzavta — a monthly cultural dinner salon. The name comes from the Hebrew word for the act of sitting together among friends: sharing food and conversation in a spirit of openness and welcome. Each Tzavta dinner brings together a guest speaker, a meal, and a room full of people who may not know each other, organized around a theme that ranges from food history to music to politics to memory. It is the sidewalk ballet in a room — the idea that a bakery is not just a place to buy bread but a place where a community recognizes itself.
Key takeaways
- Sidewalk Citizen Bakery was founded by Aviv Fried, who came to Calgary from Israel in 1999 to study engineering and turned down a finance career to become a baker — despite having never made bread before.
- The bakery is named after Jane Jacobs and her concept of the sidewalk ballet — the idea that streets and neighbourhoods are healthiest when ordinary people participate in their public life every day.
- Sidewalk Citizen opened its first location in 2010 and moved to the historic 1912 Simmons Building in Calgary's East Village in 2015, where it serves as an anchor tenant in the neighbourhood's revitalization.
- The bakery is credited with bringing babka, shakshuka, and labneh to Western Canada — foods common in Israel and among Jewish communities across North America but largely unknown in Calgary before Fried introduced them.
- Tzavta, launched in January 2016, is a monthly cultural dinner salon where food, conversation, and community intersect — named after the Hebrew word for sitting together among friends.
- Sidewalk Citizen employs more than 40 people and makes all of its bread and pastries fresh daily from local ingredients, including its signature organic sourdough and sourdough croissants.
Frequently asked questions
- Where is Sidewalk Citizen Bakery located?
- Sidewalk Citizen Bakery's main location is in the historic Simmons Building in Calgary's East Village, at 618 Confluence Way SE. The Simmons Building — a restored 1912 mattress factory — became a food and culture hub after Calgary's 2013 floods and is now one of the most visited destinations in the East Village neighbourhood.
- Who founded Sidewalk Citizen Bakery?
- Sidewalk Citizen Bakery was founded by Aviv Fried, who was born just outside Tel Aviv, Israel, and came to Calgary in 1999 to study engineering at the University of Calgary. After graduating, he turned down a finance career to become a baker — despite having never made a loaf of bread. He launched the bakery as a bicycle delivery operation before opening his first storefront in 2010.
- What does 'Sidewalk Citizen' mean?
- The name is a reference to Jane Jacobs, the urbanist whose 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities introduced the concept of the 'sidewalk ballet' — the daily choreography of ordinary street life that makes a neighbourhood feel alive and safe. A 'sidewalk citizen' is someone who participates in the public life of their street. Fried named the bakery after this idea because he wanted it to be a community institution, not just a food business.
- What is Tzavta at Sidewalk Citizen?
- Tzavta is a monthly cultural dinner salon that Sidewalk Citizen launched in January 2016. The name comes from the Hebrew word for sitting together among friends. Each event brings together a guest speaker, a communal meal, and a room of people organized around a theme — ranging from food history and music to politics and memory. Tzavta reflects the bakery's commitment to being a cultural gathering space as much as a food business.
- What is Sidewalk Citizen known for?
- Sidewalk Citizen is best known for its organic sourdough bread, sourdough croissants, and Brioche Fried Egg Breakfast Sandwich. They are widely credited with bringing babka, shakshuka, and labneh to Western Canada — foods common in Israel and Jewish communities across North America but essentially unknown in Calgary before Fried introduced them. The Tzavta cultural dinner salon has also become a significant part of their identity.
- What is the Simmons Building in Calgary?
- The Simmons Building is a heritage industrial building in Calgary's East Village, originally constructed in 1912 as a mattress factory for the Simmons Bedding Company. It survived Calgary's 2013 floods and was restored as part of the East Village revitalization effort, becoming a food and culture hub anchored by Sidewalk Citizen Bakery and a craft brewery. The building is one of the most significant examples of adaptive reuse in downtown Calgary.
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