Einstein Bros Bagels

Einstein Bros is my favorite place to get a quick breakfast on campus. The food is great, it’s easy to get creative with your meal, and I’m happy with the prices. I’ve never encountered someone on staff who wasn’t really friendly.

I have been visiting Einstein Bros since it opened in the chemistry physics building. Their coffee has been a staple in my life recently and a requisite for keeping the neurons firing. The coffee at first was comparable in quality to other shops like Starbucks (recognizing that Starbucks isn’t quite the best benchmark for quality coffee). With time, however, the quality of the coffee has progressively gotten worse. Over the last two weeks, the coffee has been diluted down to something mildly stronger than herbal tea. Moreover, the coffee bins are frequently empty, so typically I need to combine two or three bins just to make a single cup. Today’s cup was so weak (a colleague concurs) that I’m waiting for it to cool so I can feed it to my plant.
The food generally is quite good, although the lines can be horrendous like a Justin Bieber concert at a middle school. I’m very surprised that they rarely open a second register in those moments, despite having several folks bumping into one another in the front-​of-​the-​house food prep area. Having worked in a kitchen myself, the adage ‘too many cooks in the kitchen’ is a real concept: if they halved the food prep staff and consolidate stations, they’d see faster throughput. Reallocate the NUBs to the register and they’ll double the rate at which they process customers. With the excess labor capacity, they can dedicate someone to man the coffee stations and actually measure the correct water/​coffee ratio. Sounds like a win-​win to me.