Jake V.
Yelp
My girl & I had been looking for a good breakfast spot in Chapel Hill where we could get quality Benedicts, and we finally found 1: Snooze, one of the newer locations at Eastgate, a shopping area that gets a lot of foot traffic even on weekday brunch times. Thankfully, we didn't have to wait to be seated at Snooze on a busy Wednesday brunch time.
We were taken to a small table that's pretty close to an occupied table with 2 people in a cramped area; Despite Snooze's large and open space with a nice outdoor seating and a bar (probably the largest restaurant in Eastgate), it seems that there is a spacing issue, and it looks like there was only 1 waitress assigned to our section. She said her name is Baj, and I'll talk about her customer service later, but first: the food!
I ordered the Barbacoa Chile Verde Benny & my girl ordered the Smashed Avocado Benny & we got a blueberry pancake for us to share. Orders arrived in about 12 min., which is relatively fast considering Snooze's busy brunch time.
It was my first time trying a Benny with Barbacoa (shredded beef - Mexican barbecue style), and the meat tasted as what I expected from a Barbacoa dish, and there was a fine amount in my Benny. Instead of English muffin, this one has a layer of tortilla in the bottom. The green chile sauce, melted cheese. green chile hollandaise, pico de gallo & cotija cheese all create a Mexican twist to a typical Benedict, but after trying this, I think I still prefer a typical Benny with ham, English muffin, etc,.
There was issue in my order: 1 of the 2 eggs it came with was cooked too long, so it's more like a hard-boiled egg than a poached one, so I told Baj about it, and a manager came to check what the problem was. She asked what wanted, replacing the one wrongly-cooked egg is just fine, and she said they could do that, so I received the 1 replacement egg. I ended up eating that 1 egg by itself because I already devoured the rest of the Benny while waiting.
Other than that mistake, the Bennys were generally satisfying with a healthy amount of well-baked hashbrowns on the side. My girl enjoyed her Smashed Avocado Benny, which looked quite healthy, with large slices of tomatoes, just the right amount of avocado & everything else. The $6+ blueberry pancake we shared was fine but they did not serve enough syrup, and the server did not even bother to ask if we need anything else, so we weren't able to ask for more.
Snooze's customer service clearly needs improvement. While server Baj seemed friendly at first, she didn't accommodate our needs well - we had to call her to get water refills and ketchup for our hashbrowns, and not even once did she ask if we needed anything else like that pancake syrup! As for our bill, she just silently placed it on our table, making us wonder what she just put, while she took orders from the customers beside us. When we were ready to pay, she just put the payment device in front of us, and she seemed to be more cheerful doing that than actually serving us well. I was thankful that she called the manager about the egg issue, and that the manager was able to resolve it well, but overall, the customer service is just disappointing.
It's not easy to find a good Benny in Chapel Hill, so I still think it's a blessing to have Snooze, a nice brunch spot with quality breakfast and a vibrant ambiance. If you prefer alcohol with your brunch, Snooze's bartender can serve that to your table. The outdoor seating is also nice but there were no customers there despite the short line of waiting ones while we were seated there. I wouldn't say that we will never return here, but probably not anytime soon. We are willing to go farther to get a better breakfast/brunch experience with professional customer service.
Overall Score: 3.1/5
