Sunday Rant V

Here's a non-photography related rant, and it's about Sunday brunch. Yes, brunch...the meal that is neither fish nor fowl...neither breakfast nor lunch and neither this nor that...the hideous meal that's supposed to combine breakfast and lunch.

Living in an area of Manhattan that seemingly has more restaurants and cafes than people, I'm getting increasingly ticked off by this in-your-face scam which restaurants love to heave on its patrons every Sunday. Why do restaurants love brunches? Because it's a breakfast with the price tag of a decent lunch. You do the math: a couple of eggs, a bunch of left-over reheated spinach (if you order eggs Florentine), maybe a few dry rashers of bacon, and worst of all a glass of orange juice mixed with plonky champagne called Mimosa, or some other revolting variation. Moreover, anyone can cook a brunch. On Sunday, the higher-paid chefs can stay home, have a proper lunch, and leave the "understudies" to cook on brunch days.

The argument for the brunch scam is that people wake up late on Sundays, and take their time before having their first meals. I have no problem with that. These people can have a late breakfast wherever and whenever they want. What I have a problem with is that the majority of restaurants in the area do not offer lunch on Sundays...just brunch at lunch prices. In fact, I've sat down in restaurants on Sundays a few times and got haughty looks because I asked for a "lunch" menu...snotty up-and-down looks as if I had just walked in from the Gobi desert.

You want to know why they don't offer you a lunch menu and a brunch menu on Sundays? Because a three-year old would immediately realize that brunch is a scam...and would order from the lunch menu. The restaurant owners wouldn't like it and the chefs would hate it.

I admire whoever started this brunch scam...I really do. Charging lunch prices for a three-dollar breakfast and getting away with it is chutzpah with a capital C.

That's my rant and that's why I don't do brunches.

Posted in: Rants