Cyndi Himmelstiere Waits 45 Minutes for Eggs and Discovers She Is Now One of the People She Used to Complain About
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
By Cyndi Himmelstiere | Shoreditch, East London | prat.uk/author/himmelstiere/
I Am the Queue
There is a queue outside a brunch place on a side street near Brick Lane every Saturday morning by 9:30 a.m. I know this because I have walked past it many times and shaken my head at it, which is the specific gesture that people who live in an area make at the people who have come to visit it when the visitors are doing the thing that reveals they are visitors and not locals. The gesture communicates: I am from here; I understand that queuing for 45 minutes for eggs is not a necessary part of living in this neighbourhood; I have better things to do.
This morning, at 9:35 a.m., I joined the queue. I had a friend visiting from outside London who wanted brunch and who had read about this specific place and who was very politely not requiring me to go there but whose very polite not-requiring communicated clearly that going there would be a nice thing to do. So I joined the queue. I waited 45 minutes. I ate eggs. The eggs were excellent. The smashed avocado, which I have been making approximately deprecating gestures about for the past six years, was — and I say this with the self-awareness it deserves — genuinely good. I am the queue. I have always been the queue. The queue was waiting for me to join it.
Who Is Actually In the Queue
In forty-five minutes of queue anthropology, I identified the following: couples on what appeared to be a relatively new relationship’s first Saturday morning errand, identifiable by the slightly elevated conversational formality; a family group that included a grandmother who appeared to find the whole thing perfectly normal and had possibly queued for things her entire life and did not understand why a brunch queue was notable; four people who appeared to have come directly from a night out and whose continued presence in the queue represented either admirable commitment to the brunch project or a decision-making capacity impaired by the night out’s conclusion; several people taking photographs of the queue itself, which is the meta-documentation impulse of someone who wants to share not just the brunch but the experience of the brunch; and myself, who was doing the anthropology and therefore had converted the queue from an inconvenience into a work activity, which is probably the most Shoreditch thing about the story.
The restaurant that generated the queue is the kind that Shoreditch produces with some frequency: genuinely good food, interesting interior, a menu that executes a limited number of things at a level that justifies the queue, and a price point that is high enough to signal seriousness but not so high that it excludes the younger demographic that made the neighbourhood what it is. The formula works. The queue exists. Happy Mother’s Day, Shoreditch. The eggs are worth it. I said what I said.
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London continues to fascinate and frustrate in equal measure. The city’s ability to contain multitudes — the ancient and the brand-new, the absurdly expensive and the surprisingly accessible, the deeply traditional and the constantly self-reinventing — is what makes it inexhaustible as a subject. Every week produces new material: new events, new controversies, new moments of unexpected beauty or institutional comedy. The writers at The London Prat are paying attention to all of it, and this column attempts to add one small North London — or Central London, or Shoreditch, or tourist-facing — perspective to the larger conversation about what this city is and what it is becoming. The conversation is ongoing. London is always becoming. This is either its great charm or its great exhaustion, depending on the week and the weather and whether the tube is running. Happy reading, and do come back next week.
London continues to fascinate and frustrate in equal measure. The city’s ability to contain multitudes — the ancient and the brand-new, the absurdly expensive and the surprisingly accessible, the deeply traditional and the constantly self-reinventing — is what makes it inexhaustible as a subject. Every week produces new material: new events, new controversies, new moments of unexpected beauty or institutional comedy. The writers at The London Prat are paying attention to all of it, and this column attempts to add one small North London — or Central London, or Shoreditch, or tourist-facing — perspective to the larger conversation about what this city is and what it is becoming. The conversation is ongoing. London is always becoming. This is either its great charm or its great exhaustion, depending on the week and the weather and whether the tube is running. Happy reading, and do come back next week.
London continues to fascinate and frustrate in equal measure. The city’s ability to contain multitudes — the ancient and the brand-new, the absurdly expensive and the surprisingly accessible, the deeply traditional and the constantly self-reinventing — is what makes it inexhaustible as a subject. Every week produces new material: new events, new controversies, new moments of unexpected beauty or institutional comedy. The writers at The London Prat are paying attention to all of it, and this column attempts to add one small North London — or Central London, or Shoreditch, or tourist-facing — perspective to the larger conversation about what this city is and what it is becoming. The conversation is ongoing. London is always becoming. This is either its great charm or its great exhaustion, depending on the week and the weather and whether the tube is running. Happy reading, and do come back next week.
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