Old School Bagel Cafe — Restaurant in Oklahoma City

Was excited to see this location finally opened after a year of waiting! New construction so everything looks great of course. The dining area feels open and airy with plenty of seating at the time I visited (about 10am on a weekday). The young woman working the register was my only employee contact during my visit but she was great. She was very interactive with my 8 year old daughter and very helpful with any questions that I had. I was pleased that all the bagels I wanted were still in-stock as I had a decent sized to-go order and the price seems about on par with other breakfast offerings in the area. Having been a frequent customer at their Norman location, I expected the same great quality, but what I received were just 'ok' bagels with the bulk of the criticism coming from the lack of ingredients that make the bagels. The other location mentioned above would pile cheddar cheese on their jalapeno cheddar bagel to the point that there is no hole in center, only a thick cheese circle and diced jalapeños are found throughout the bagel, but my visit yielded bagels with very little cheese sprinkled on the bagels and virtually no.peppers within the dough. The Asiago cheese bagels were the same as were the cinnamon toast bagels, both just needing more of everything. They weren't 'bad' by any means, they just didn't live up to the quality and flavor that I have come to expect from OSB. Maybe this is on par with all the other locations locally and just Norman is the outlier with amazing bagels? Another minor criticism relates to the design of the counter area. I thought they would have several bins of bagels behind glass so that customers could see what they look like before buying and how many are left of each kind (handy if placing a large multi-flavor order), but they only have a few plates with display bagels on them. Not a big deal, just kinda inconvenient not being able to see what they have in stock Will any of these issues keep me from dining here on a weekly basis? Probably not...yet. As with any place that just recently opened, they deserve time to get all the kinks ironed out and to identify their best practices. I look forward to what they...

I ordered 2 of the large, 8 ounce size lox cream cheese "spread" and paid $18 for it, expecting it to have some lox flavor in it. When I got it home and opened the container I was horrified to see only a few very small specs of lox in the cream cheese. It had absolutely ZERO lox/salmon flavor in it! $9 bucks for 8 ounces of virtually plain cream cheese! They might as well just saved themselves the effort and put no lox in it at all! Perhaps they screwed me on the microscopic amount of lox they added to this "small batch" of lox cream cheese because I did not add a tip to the $18 I spent on this? I have a policy of never tipping a service before I have received it, for the very reason I experienced here. It was absolutely TERRIBLE service! Friends, I caution you to seriously question your choice of bagel stores before you decide on Old School Bagels. Their bagels are just average but they really punish you with terrible service if you don't tip them ahead of seeing the results of that service. If they argue that I wasn't punished for omitting a tip, then this is terrible service for being their norm. Do NOT, I repeat DO NOT buy their small (8 ounce) tub of lox cream cheese. Just go out and buy the 8 ounce tub of Philadelphia Salmon flavored cream cheese for 1/3rd the price and purchase Thomas bagels instead. Their salmon-flavored cream cheese is much better and much cheaper than this batch of virtually flavorless spread and Thomas' bagels are much better. Sorry for the long review but I have never been screwed like this for something I have purchased from a specialty business such as a bagel shop. I warn you to avoid wasting your money on this business. You will be punished in some way for not tipping them at the time you place your order. This is an excellent example of why you should not do that. Whether it's punishment for not tipping them prior to receiving the service or just their normal level of service, either way you are risking being screwed out of your...

We won’t be returning to this Old School Bagel location, even though it’s the most convenient to our home. We used to visit regularly for breakfast, but in three of our last five visits, our food orders were completely wrong. Each time, we had to return to the counter, and we were never alone. Customers from the drive-thru were constantly walking in with messed-up or switched orders.

During our visit today, I watched a customer open his bagel, realize it wasn’t his, and take it back to the counter. An employee then handled the food with bare hands and placed it into another customer’s bag. That’s a serious food safety issue, and no one behind the counter seemed to think it was a problem.

Communication also seems to be a challenge here. According to the manager, Heath, many of the errors stem from language barriers among staff, which appears to contribute to the frequent mix-ups.

Even when orders are clearly wrong, the staff rarely apologize, and you won’t receive any kind of comp or acknowledgment for the mistake or the long wait. There’s no sign that this location values its customers. After repeated bad experiences, it’s clear to us that Old School Bagel has shown no appreciation for our continued business, so we’ll no longer give them ours. It’s just plain terrible customer service.

We’ve been to every OSB location in the OKC metro, and this is the only one with these issues. Other locations, like the north Edmond store on Covell run by Sonny Yocum, are well-managed and have strong community support. He’s even expanded his business. That clearly shows this isn’t a brand-wide problem—it’s a management problem specific to this store.

With a new Einstein Bros Bagels opening just a few miles away in the coming days, the owner here should be seriously rethinking how this place is run. This location already has the lowest review score of any Old School Bagel in the area, and it’s not hard to see why. The proof is out there for anyone to see, and it...