Brunch – the handy tool for restaurants looking to plug that mid-morning customer-shaped hole – has gone too far. A place in Manchester recently launched an “electro brunch”, which sounds like a combination of late breakfast and torture. Like Sankeys with crumpets, your hands up for Detroit and help yourself to extra hollandaise. Presumably, these events are frequented by the same people who go to lunchtime networking raves and silent discos.
In an interview last year, Julian Casablancas, former lead singer of the Strokes, said he’d decided to leave New York because of the sheer number of people eating brunch. If he washed up in Blighty, he might have wondered why he’d bothered, or at least tried to write them a decent soundtrack.
Sunday brunch should conjure up images of percolating coffee, maybe a pastry item, definitely an egg and maybe, if you’re unlucky, Tim Lovejoy. But a DJ? This previously small subsection of a few menus has now progressed to full-blown brunch “clubs” popping up all over the place, offering a world of egg-based delights, and even buckets of fizzy booze in some cases, for a set fee. What is essentially “breakfast for people who sleep in/are hungover” is now everywhere to such a degree that extras such as music and unlimited booze are being tacked on to make one brunch stand out from another. Where will it go next? Free massages? Xbox? Naked swingball?
I’m not against the idea entirely (bar the swingball) – I took my partner out for posh hotel brunch on one of our early dates (underlying subtext – if it goes well, we‘ve got the rest of the day ahead of us; if it goes badly, you can leave and I haven’t ruined your Sunday) and it was a success, helped in no small part by several mimosas while hotel guests shuffled past in dressing gowns with their morning papers.
But, as the brunch scene (and it is one now) progresses, I still don’t truly understand what it really is: a substitute for breakfast, or lunch, or neither? I have several questions and some concerns. Should you attempt the glorious hat-trick of meals? That largely depends on your income bracket and your family status. If you are a Dinky (double income, no kids yet), then you should brunch until your head turns into an enormous muffin and hang the consequences. For the average parent, by the time brunch happens, you’ve been up at least five hours and may have already had lunch. And dinner.
Should it involve booze? For me, this is a solid yes. Having a drink before midday is still a Russian roulette affair in Britain, unless you’re in a branch of Wetherspoons, where it is gleefully classed as breakfast and nobody looks at you in a judgmental way. So go with like-minded individuals. I can handle a prosecco and a muffin before This Morning has finished. Have a coffee to be polite though.
What if you don’t like eggs or raw fish? Spinach seems to be the heavily fancied alternative for the egg averse, and “smashed” avocado on toast is now ubiquitous (this is a normal avocado that has been stood on). The mark-up on brunch is usually astounding though. On one (London) menu, I saw duck egg en cocotte with wild mushrooms,gruyère, truffle and soldiers for £13. Thirteen quid? For posh egg and soldiers?
But, most of all, I worry about the impact on the humble all-day breakfast, a meal that clearly states its terms and conditions and which regularly acts as a gastronomic get-out-of-jail-free card for those who couldn’t give a toss about smoked eel with horseradish and samphire. It would be a shame to see the open-all-hours fry-up left behind.
According to some, the origins of brunch trace back to English hunt breakfasts in the 1920s, with the bells and whistles added the following decade by our American cousins, who threw in bagels, waffles, pancakes and, crucially, alcohol.
Based on this evolution, perhaps the perfect modern brunch should reflect the best of both cultures. Calorie-laden or rigorously raw and healthy, ideally enjoyed while half-drunk … but preferably – definitely – without a side order of German techno.
