Brooklyn Water Bagels Winter Park Exposed? Former Assistant Manager Reveals Rodent Droppings, Tap Water Scam & Total Chaos in Florida

I got in touch with colleagues from a former employer and asked how things were going. This is what was said about the University/Winter Park location of Brooklyn Water Bagels.

This review comes from a former Assistant Manager of Brooklyn Water Bagels. He stated that he had been with the company since 2024 and had heard numerous employee complaints about the company dating back to before 2022 from both current and former staff. He left the company in 2026 following an altercation with the manager of the same location, referred to simply as Santiago, and the District Manager, a man in his late 20s named Matthew Bothe. Matthew Bothe is the son of Christi Bothe, the current COO (Chief Operating Officer) of Brooklyn Water Bagels.

Former Assistant Manager of Brooklyn Water Bagels (University/Winter Park):

It is genuinely laughable how poorly run the Brooklyn Water Bagels operation is. There is zero structure, zero foresight, and absolutely zero meaningful support from upper management or corporate.

The frontline team is chronically overwhelmed and constantly playing catch-up, yet corporate keeps piling on more and more gimmicks to the menu as if it’s some kind of twisted game. Every time the crew falls behind—which happens multiple times per shift—management gets frustrated and takes it out on the very people who are already drowning. The cycle is as predictable as it is exhausting: the team can’t keep up → corporate adds more complicated items → service collapses → blame the crew → repeat. It’s not a business strategy; it’s self-inflicted chaos.

And then they have the audacity to act shocked when things go wrong or when their employee turnover rate is horrendously high.

Let’s talk about the equipment—or should I say, the museum pieces we’re expected to work with. We’re using an ancient pizza peel that should have been retired years ago, a “rapid cook” oven that cooks anything but rapidly, and a water filtration system whose tank runs dry so often that we’re regularly forced to bypass it entirely. That’s right—for extended stretches of time, this “Brooklyn Water Bagels” location is serving customers plain old Florida tap water while still charging premium prices and advertising “authentic Brooklyn filtered water.” That’s not just sloppy. That’s straight-up false advertising, and quite frankly, they should be sued.

Not even the fundamentals?

You can’t even get the fundamentals right, yet you keep making terrible decisions that make everything harder:

• Adding four new bagel flavors to a bakery that’s already struggling to keep up with the original menu? Brilliant. Truly genius-level thinking.
• Installing a Sip Studio drink system right in the middle of the winter rush? Outstanding operational planning.
• Introducing avocado sandwiches that take twice as long to prepare as a simple bacon, egg, and cheese? Another masterstroke.

At this point, it’s genuinely unclear what Brooklyn Water Bagels is trying to be. A fast-casual bagel shop? A trendy café? The McDonald’s of bagels? Whatever the vision is, they’re missing the mark so badly it’s almost impressive.

The pay is abysmal—easily some of the worst in the industry for the amount of stress and physical labor involved. The only “perk” is that you’ll rack up plenty of overtime hours, most of which will be spent enduring unnecessary abuse and chaos from above. It is not worth it. I was an Assistant Manager being paid $15/hr in an unstable environment under broken corporate leadership.

The only redeeming factor is that the entry-level workers are usually pretty cool people… at least the ones who haven’t been run off yet by the dysfunction.
One word sums this place up perfectly: Dysfunctional.

If you value your time, your money, or your sanity, I’d strongly recommend finding a bagel shop that actually knows what it’s doing. Brooklyn Water Bagels is a textbook example of how not to run a business—and how not to treat its employees.

Brooklyn Water Bagels Legacy

Since I left, the chain has continued exactly as it was before I was hired: largely irrelevant, scraping by on a dwindling miracle of loyal customers it seems determined to destroy. Multiple Florida locations have been temporarily shut down by state inspectors for serious sanitation failures—including the Jupiter store (October 2025), which was closed after inspectors found approximately 190 rodent droppings on bagel boards and racks in the production area, along with over 150 live insects crawling across the same surfaces, plus poor handwashing and unclean restrooms.

The Boca Raton Powerline Road location was ordered closed in October 2024 for flying insects landing directly on bagel boards and prep areas. Similar pest and hygiene issues have hit Hollywood and other spots over the years. These aren’t one-off problems—they’re recurring red flags that speak volumes about day-to-day operations.

The fact that the business still operates at all may be the real miracle—one that Brooklyn Water Bagels appears to be delicately (and repeatedly) undermining.

I will never return to Brooklyn Water Bagels as an employee or as a customer.
Brooklyn Water Bagels and the mistreatment of its workers have left a bad taste in my mouth.