Crafted Bagels

Today, February 19, 2016 is their last day of business. Sunflower Café will take this spot.

Good business gone bad. Maybe they’ve sold or just hired an inexperienced manager. I was a regular customer from day one. As of late the few issues I’ve had have been mishandled. Avoid this place at all costs. The food is average at best add that to a manager with no experience and you’ve got a must to avoid

Great location, pretty quick, good food and bagels, spacious, lots of options on menu. Sandwiches are packed — they don’t skimp.
And really not that expensive for a kosher place.

Great new addition to the Upper West Side! (Okay, maybe not so new now…) Their bagels are great and their pricing is awesome too ($ 0.85 for a bagel with nothing on it). However, you can end up waiting on line forever as a result of their inefficient ordering process.

These bagels are terrible I went there once and didn’t like it. I figured I would try once more. However if you want tasteless dry circles of yeast this place is right for you.

Meh… these bagels are ok. Since they are the new kid on the block you’d think they would do something different to make themselves standout. But alas… no. They are expensive, the place always smells like burnt bread, it takes them a long time to ask what you’d like (I have to get to work and the place is EMPTY), there were kids in the place and they treated them like they were gonna steal something. There are many schools within blocks of the place… it’s a no brainer… they could make a mint by changing just a few things.
Too bad. We need a better bagel place bc Tal keeps raising their prices.
Also, my bagel and OJ came to $ 6.02…I will pay what I owe, but a new place making a name for themselves may want to make a new customer happy by waiving the .02 and starting my day without the jangle of mass change in my pocket, but these are the things that start a business that lasts on the UWS. If this place lasts a year, I will be SHOCKED.
Don’t waste your time. Any bodega has the same bagel/​customer service as this place.

What a waste of a bagel.
They are Not hand crafted.
They are made by a machine and baked in a machine conveyor belt like oven. Not a bagel oven. They Don’t taste good at all.
Not a real NY bagel and The owner should be ashamed of herself Ruining her parents legacy. Her parents had one of the best hand made bagel stores in Brooklyn in the 1960s –1980s. Her parents had real eastern European bakers hand making the bagels. They were the standard that all bagels were held to when you ate a ny bagel.
This stores bagels are the gummiest inedible crustless bagels. Tastes like every bagel you get from some random supermarket outside New York City.
The owners standards are so low in this shop besides not caring about crafting or baking real bagels they sell stale cookies and baked goods instead of fresh daily.
The black and white cookies have been stale on 3 occasions i purchased them.

They may be expensive, but their specialty pizzas and salads are absolutely delicious.
This is a welcome addition to the kosher restaurant scene on the upper West side.

A bagel with egg and cheese and a small coffee = $ 7.89… Expensive and not very good. The bagel was super dry and the pumpernickel flavor was weak. So much for the name «crafted bagels.»

After reading reviews here, I was a bit apprehensive but gave Crafted Bagels a try anyway today. Ordered a toasted everything bagel with plain cream cheese and tomato slices. Paid and then unwrapped the bagel in the store to see if it looked okay. Discovered that they had forgotten to toast it. I told them and had it remade.
I understand places being busy at lunchtime — it didn’t look crazy-​busy, but I know they may have been working on some to-​go/​delivery orders. But still, how hard is it to remember to toast a bagel? I had to kind of roll my eyes about that. But, the staff seems nice and they made the new bagel fairly quickly.
It tasted good. It wasn’t the best everything bagel I’ve ever had, by far, but it was fine and had plenty of cream cheese (all warm and melty from being put on top of the toasted bagel). That was all I had ordered but I did sample a little bit of veggie tuna (they gave me some on a fork to try, at my request) and it was delicious.
My experience today? Probably a two-​and-​a-​half but it looks like their star ratings could be improved so I bumped it up to three. I’ll keep re-​evaluating/​updating as I go back and try more bagels and spreads.

I stopped here on my ride home because I didn’t have cash for Absolute and had passed Crafted a bunch of times prior. There is definitely something weird tasting about these bagels. They almost taste charred without actually being so. Not sure if something else burned in the oven, but it was off-​putting. The texture is also something akin to an attempt at recreating a New York bagel wherein all the features are there, but they seem to have been created by unorthodox processes.
Additionally, I asked explicitly for extra cream cheese but there isn’t even cc on every part of the bagel. It’s also kind of bland.
Also the ordering and checkout system is really annoying. Absolute is hard because the people on line don’t know how to order or pay for a bagel, but the system that is employed at Crafted is inefficient in its own right. I was also annoyed because having done our holiday shopping in Monsey growing up, we were constantly cut in line at various stores for not looking Jewish enough. I had the same experience here.

Things have gone from bad to worse at Crafted Bagels. I’m Waiting For «The GOING OUT OF BUSINESS» signs to appear! I was excited for this place to open since I live across the street but after 2 tries, I won’t be back!
With a staff of about 11 people it was hard to watch the tragedy of errors taking place among these sadly untrained and unsupported kids! They certainly seemed nice enough but clearly the big problem here is an owner and/​or manager that hasn’t a clue on running a business or guiding a successful team. To write the details of what went wrong during my visit to Crafted would be a Novel and not a review so I’ll just suggest to the staff that they seek employment elsewhere, they’re going to need it. And to the arrogant little boss man barking orders at a bunch of kids who are there for you and the wellbeing of your investment, shut up and take a class!

Rude and disrespectful. That’s how I describe the service we had at this establishment. Not coming back.

If using seamless web for delivery: they do not usually have all the items listed on the seamless menu, if you order something that they do not have they will not refund you the money back and instead make you choose something of equal value.

I am PUMPED to have this new Kosher Bakery/​Sandwich place on the upper west side. I came here for breakfast a few weeks ago. I ordered an egg and cheese on a bagel. There was a nice proportion of egg and cheese to bagel — it wasn’t just one egg in a bagel, which would be way too little.
My friend ordered the bagel and lox. She was also really happy with it. I tried her bagel and I was really happy with the lox and cream cheese quality.
The bagels are good. Not as good as Absolute Bagels, but better than Bagel Basket.
The service was a bit slow when we went, but it’s a new place and it seems like they’re still figuring themselves out.
Either way — I hope this place has a long future here.

Eh. why is it so hard to find a good bagel on the upper west side?
Points for being clean and having a large menu.
Coffee was good, however bagels were only so-​so.
Also the whole check out and ordering process isn’t very organized.
Better than Tal Bagels but nothing amazing.

I’ll preface this review with the fact that this is a Kosher establishment. And my good friend (unknowingly) went up to the counter and this is how the conversation went:
Friend: I’d like a BACON and egg on a toasted bagel please.
Guy: No meat.
F: What? No meat? Are you out of bacon? Can I have ham then?
G: No meat. We don’t serve meat. (very stern face, thick accent)
F: *confused* (until I told her its a kosher bagel store)
[The whole interaction was very funny to watch.]
We were staying at my friends apt on the UWS and decided to pop in here before heading back out to the island. The place had limited seating considering the space was fairly large. There’s a bit of confusion since people ordered at the grill and at the bagel station. I ordered a whole wheat toasted with scallion cream cheese. One really neat factor was that you can see the bagels coming right out of the oven and off the conveyor belt into the baskets. Mine was fresh off the press.
People said they liked the chewy characteristic of the bagel. Not me. It was almost… crunchy? And flavorless. It was just a strange texture to me. AND they gave me what, a half a teaspoon of cream cheese?! Okay, maybe I’m spoiled with LI bagels in that they put more than enough cream cheese that it’s essentially overflowing out of the bagel. Now that’s more like it.

Great bagel sandwich. Prices are right, especially for kosher. Super clean store and very attentive service. All in all a really nice addition to the neighborhood.

The bagels and flat tires (like a flagel) are really delish… But the appetizing looks «crusty» … Like it’s been sitting untouched for too long (ick)
But the thing that is causing me to give this brand new place two stars is the BEYOND LOUSY service and mismanagement.
It feels as though the customer is the least important player here. We waited 15 mins for 4 bagels… Nothing on them… No one acknowledged our presence… Even after speaking up… Another 6 mins!
And no one seems in charge… No one seems to pay any attention to the customers, no one seems to be supervising production… @ 10 am they were out of many bagel varieties but not communicating to customers… At checkout my neighbor reported she had waited 15 mins for a whole wheat bagel… Only after the fact learning that they were making more and that she had waited for the new batch…“if I’d known I would have gotten something else“
In short, I can’t imagine people — especially me– returning unless management actively manages this place!!!

Great bagels– they aren’t the giant, fluffy monstrosities that I’m seeing more often in NYC than I’d like. These are smaller, more dense, and chewy. A proper bagel. I’m suspecting that the «Flat tire», which isn’t available yet in the soft-​opening, will be a Flagel (Bagel that is smooshed after boiling, before being baked), but maybe it’ll be a more Montréal-​style bagel if we’re lucky.
This place advertises itself as an Appetizing shop in the old sense. They make all of their cured fish in house. I had the lox (which, amusingly, the deli guy referred to as ‘salty lox’ because they also have ‘nova lox’, ‘pastrami lox’, and something else I can’t recall). Excellent, good and salty. You want soft, flavorless fish bacon, go to Noahs, you yutz. It was salty enough to balance what I thought was a lack of salt in the bagel alone– I’d up that. I’ll try the pickled herring next time I’m around.
Scallion cream cheese was good. I asked them to put it on light, and they did. Always a plus.
I’m intrigued by what I can only assume were two varieties of mandelbrot in the counter, one of which was chocolate dipped.
It’s good– I’ll come again along this way. I look forward to more crazy house-​made appetizings when they get going in full swing.