Magnolia Bakery - Los Angeles — Restaurant in Los Angeles

PLEASE improve your response time, phone answering at the store, customer service, and specialized cake decorating services.

I am not one to write negative reviews and bash a business..I know there are hiccups and mistakes and that's totally fine. I have several businesses I own as well, so I get it. But I'm writing this so hopefully someone higher up can help improve this location as I LOVE the cakes and desserts and will try to order from here once more...but I'm now going to be super super diligent on checking that everything is running smoothly because they almost ruined the cake for my baby shower day of. Here's the story..

POOR RESPONSE TIME: My mom placed an order for a cake with oranges on it for my little cutie themed baby shower July 12th. She called and emailed early June to get the order placed and in the screenshot, you can see they do not respond to emails consistently (this actually happened again back in March for my mom's birthday where it took over a week, 3 emails and me going INTO the store physically to get a response...I attached the photo as well). My mom called the store several times with no response just like I did back in March. Finally got through to someone and was charged $85 for a cake + $25 for a special design. It's a week before the shower, she calls again to confirm everything is good for 7/12 since she hadn't heard back from them in June and someone on the phone confirmed its all set.

LACK OF PHONE COMMUNICATION IN STORE: Enough said. They rarely answer their phones. Please hire more staff to help with that.

POOR CUSTOMER SERVICE : It's the day of the shower and my mother in law gets the cake from the store (after waiting 20 minutes) and brings it back to the house. It's completely wrong...it's just white icing with sprinkles on it. No special design that we paid for, so an hour before people arrive she goes back and requests the oranges design. The lady at the front desk said it'll be another $25 to redo it and my MIL said we already paid that..she continued to blame us for not responding to the email even though we did and we called the week prior...We asked for a partial refund if they wouldn't redo the cake we paid extra for or honestly anything in return for this last minute ordeal and they refused to partial refund. Instead just asked for more money :')

Finally after my MIL kept going back and forth with the front desk associate, the baker comes out and just scrapes off the icing and does the design. This should've never been an argument..absolute awful customer service.

If it were my business, I would have fixed the cake immediately knowing the shower was in about an hour and given some kind of apology or credit to come back as it was 100% the businesses fault....nothing. We got none of the above :/

Hopefully your experience was better than my last 2 experiences..maybe I just got unlucky both times. Third time is a charm and after that I won't go to this bakery anymore. Again, I hope the business in itself is fixed because the quality of food is great...but no matter how good a product is, if the experience is awful...it's a waste...

Rude staff, mediocre baked good, worst customer service I’ve received. Tried to place an order earlier in the week over the phone, left a voicemail, no one got back to me.

Drove across town to the bakery itself, to place my order directly. Talked to James, he was actually the only polite and friendly person I’ve interacted with there.

He assured me everything would be ready for me to pick up a few days later.

When the day came (Friday), I called in the morning to make sure everything would be ready and accounted for. The guy on the other line assured me it would be ready to pick up by 5pm.

I got there at 5pm, and when I asked the clerk about the order, he looked confused, said he was going to look for it.

Then I waited…

I waited there for 20min. Nothing was said, no update, no communication whatsoever. It’s like they looked through me. This is probably the real live version of being ghosted.

Every-time I tried to make eye contact with a staff member, they would look in the other direction, or turn their back away to clean the counter.

When I tell you this was one of the most awkward retail experience of my life…

When I eventually get the attention of someone, he tells me with a straight face “just give them 20min, they forgot to make the cupcakes”.

The nonchalant tone, and lack of apology sincerely made me think I heard that wrong.

Like there is no way I’m waiting 40minutes total for an order I physically placed days prior, and checked on the day of.

Got my cupcakes eventually, the cashier practically through them at me and turned around, again no apologies.

Anyway… Spare yourself the trouble, there is tons of place around that won’t put you through this.

I recommend Pitchoun! bakery up the street, and also and bakery at Farmers Market...

This is the most overrated bakery I have ever been to, or maybe LA people like what they like. I had the banana pudding and a slice of red velvet cake. I’ll start with the pudding. The pudding was pretty good. It reminded me of something my very Southern Grandma would make for the holidays. So if you’re JUST going for the BP, you won’t be disappointed.

Now on to the red velvet cake. IT. WAS. HORRIBLE. It was extremely dry and had a very bland, mild, semi-sweet flavor. Having possibly eaten my body weight in red velvet cake in my collective existence, I was expecting the dense, flavorful rendition I was used to. But this was really light and dry and tasted almost artificial. Like they baked a vanilla cake and threw in a little red food coloring in hopes they could pass it off. I wish we could leave it at that, but there’s more. They didn’t even use the traditional cream cheese frosting!! It was a whipped vanilla. face palm. Every single southern mother and grandmother from years past are rolling in their graves due to this western assault on a southern classic. Red velvet is NOT red velvet if you don’t use cream cheese frosting. What the heck LA!!??

The location and ambiance were cute. There were only three other people there when I went, but I can totally see it being a pain in the butt to enjoy your treats if there’s more than 15 people. The seating is very limited. All in all, I’m glad I went. But I don’t think I’ll...