“People get probably too intoxicated every once in a while,” Enzo’s owner Sean Croce said.
Tram Nguyen
Special to Mustang News
Two men arrived at Enzo’s Eatery downtown San Luis Obispo at approximately 1:30 a.m. on a Sunday night in a car that had Cal Poly stickers on it. They were drunk.
Chance Roberts, the only employee working at that time, saw one of the two intoxicated men reaching down the glass surrounding his pizza-making area and attempting to steal a couple slices of pizza. He called the police. According to Roberts, it’s not uncommon for drunk customers to steal food at Enzo’s.
“When there’s only one (worker) here,” Roberts said, “(the thieves) like to stand right here,” Roberts points at a corner beyond the glass surrounding his working area, next to the pizza oven, “and grab a chair if they’re not so tall, and I’m standing at the grill, then I can’t see it.”
Despite the occasional thefts and resulting damages, Enzo’s owner Sean Croce said he doesn’t think Cal Poly students intend for these incidents to happen.
“People get probably too intoxicated every once in a while,” he said. “But that’s not just the students; that’s everybody that goes out and drinks. If they drink too much, that’s what’s going to happen. But they’re harmless, you know, they’re just going out and trying to have a good time in between their studies and letting off a little steam.”
He said when they’re caught stealing pizza, they will pay for it, and they only steal because they are too intoxicated and want pizza “now and free.”
Besides pizza, drunk people sometimes take pizza baskets out of Enzo’s door without permission — and without knowing it, Croce said. When that happens, Croce offers them a to-go box instead.
“They like to steal these,” he said, glancing at the spice and cheese shakers on the table.
Croce said unless violence is involved, he doesn’t call the police very often. That normally happens once a month.
“We have fun with (the students), we joke with them — can’t take anything too serious — and give them their food,” Croce said. “And they’ll have a great time and come back, or they wake up and they call you for delivery because they remember they had some good (food) the night before, and it all works out.”
But drunk customers have also damaged Enzo’s: Some leaned on and bent the restaurant’s metal chairs and broke them, three drunk women got up on a footless shelf attached only to a wall to take pictures and the shelf fell down and others ripped off pictures in the restroom, Croce said.
Croce identified them as general customers, not just Cal Poly students.
Each metal chair is $40-$50, and a big slice of pizza is $3, but Croce said it’s “not too bad” that he pays approximately $100 a month on average to repair everything.
“If $12 (for a picture in the restroom) goes away, then it goes away,” he said. “But I still like to try to keep it nice for people to look at.”
Croce said students going out and spending money is what keeps the whole town going, and for the most part, “these kids are fun.”
“Sometimes damage will happen to chairs or tables or bathroom, but that’s part of doing business,” he said. “You just have to repair and move on. Would you rather have that problem or would you rather have nobody coming in and you’re sitting here going, ‘Oh, my gosh.’ You know, that’s a bigger problem.”
Enzo’s is busiest on Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday between 11 p.m. and 2 a.m., especially after customers get out of SLO Brewing Co. next door around 1:30 a.m.
SLO Brewing Co.’s manager Monte Schaller declined to comment on Cal Poly students, saying the bar sees up to 5,000 people walk through its doors on any given week, including college and non-college students.
“While incidents do occur, it’d be unfair to suggest that they were Cal Poly students, since their collegiate orientation, if any, is usually not known,” Schaller wrote in an email to Mustang News. “All I can say is that we take everyone’s safety very seriously, college student or not, and if there are any incidents, they are dealt with on a need-to basis with authorities.”
Twenty-one-year-old John Fitch, an agricultural business senior, said he visits bars once during the weekend and often goes to Frog and Peach, Mother’s Tavern and SLO Brewing Co.
Approximately three weeks ago, he saw a “very belligerent” Cal Poly student resisting an arrest by the police in front of Mother’s Tavern.
“They really had to push him down and hopped on top of him,” he said.
He said he has done many stupid things in his life, but “luckily, none of those things were downtown.”
“I think that because a lot of their business is Cal Poly students, the restaurants or bars don’t particularly care how the students act,” he said. “At the same time, it’s not a good thing that students are getting drunk and wild all the time and making a big, old fuss. It can be bothersome to the local San Luis Obispo population besides the college students.”
Correction: This article previously quoted Enzo’s owner Sean Croce as saying students are homeless, when he actually said harmless. It has since been fixed.