The Problems With Enid's
Server Lynnea Scalora is feeling alienated from her labor: "When you're a server, you're someone's slave," she tells Grub Street. Why does she feel this way? Probably because she works at Enid's, which as any Greenpoint/Wburg resident can tell you is the innermost circle of brunch hell. The restaurant epitomizes everything that's wrong with the brunch ritual: insanely long waits, ostentatiously hip crowds reeking of booze from the night before, lots of sceneiness and and little emphasis on, you know, food-eating. Scalora has an interesting take on what makes Enid's patrons so intolerable, and maybe also some insight into why the wait is so long.
She says the problem might be the free coffee that the restaurant generously provides to guests whose idea of fun is sitting sprawled on the concrete sidewalk outside the restaurant, bragging about their hangovers for the hour that it takes to get seated. "Then there are the people who get too amped on the caffeine; when they sit down and finally look at the menu, they're so amped that their brain can't connect what they want, with communicating it with the server, with what's on the menu." Overcaffeinated hipsters! Scary.
Even scarier, though is a dangerous Jersey element that Scalora says has recently encroached, bringing all kinds of outlandish requests with them. "Maybe once a week I get a group of people ordering dirty martinis and coffee with dessert, or decaf or Splenda. All these things that aren't what happens at Enid's." Could this spell the end of brunch as we know it? We can only dream.
