Brunch is not a meal. It’s a performance review with hollandaise.
You show up hungry, under-caffeinated, and spiritually fragile, and suddenly you’re being judged by a host in wide-leg pants for not having a reservation at 11:40 on a Sunday. That is not nourishment. That is theater with poached eggs.
And listen, I love breakfast. I love lunch. I would fight a decorative candle for a good diner omelet. But brunch? Brunch took two honest meals, put them in a beige trench coat, and sent them to extort your weekend.
It’s not the food. The food is often fine. Eggs are innocent. Potatoes are heroes. Bacon has never done a damn thing wrong in its life.
The scam is the environment.
Brunch took the simple act of eating late in the morning and turned it into a luxury obstacle course where the reward is paying $24 for three bites of sourdough under a wet yellow blanket.
That blanket, by the way, is hollandaise. A beautiful, temperamental sauce made from egg yolks, butter, and lemon. In the right hands, it’s silk. In most brunch spots, it tastes like a candle that went to business school.
The Timing Is Psychotic
Breakfast knows what it is. It meets you at the crack of dawn with coffee strong enough to restart your moral compass.
Lunch knows what it is too. It lands around noon like a competent adult carrying a sandwich and a deadline.
Brunch, meanwhile, slithers into the room at 11:17 wearing sunglasses indoors. It destroys the clean geometry of the day.
Too late for breakfast. Too early for a proper lunch. Too chaotic for peace.
You wake up thinking, maybe I’ll have eggs. Then brunch says no, you’ll spend your entire late morning negotiating logistics in a group chat with six people named things like Claire and Josh and “Maya??” because no one can commit to a time, a neighborhood, or whether they’re “down for something cute.”
Cute is how people describe restaurants where the potatoes are underseasoned.
A real meal should not require calendar diplomacy. If eating eggs involves polling availability, cross-referencing subway lines, and waiting under a heat lamp near a fern wall while somebody’s friend “just finds parking,” the meal has failed as a species.
And by the time you actually sit down, your body has moved past hunger and entered that weird shark-eyed phase where you’d happily gnaw the corner off the table.
This is how brunch wins. It starves you into compliance.
Brunch Menu Prices Are Written By Hallucinating Bankers
There is no economic justification for brunch pricing. None. Zero. I’ve looked into its dead little eyes.
Eggs are not expensive. Potatoes are not expensive. Toast is the least expensive thing humanity has ever set on fire intentionally.
Yet brunch menus behave like they’re moving contraband through customs.
Twelve dollars for avocado toast used to be outrageous. Now they’ve got the confidence of casino managers. Sixteen. Eighteen. Twenty-two if there’s a poached egg and a tiny dusting of chili crisp like edible confetti on a hostage note.
And everybody acts normal about it.
No. We will not act normal.
You’re paying for a lifestyle photograph. You’re paying rent on natural light. You’re paying for the emotional experience of sitting near someone in a felt hat who says “we’re doing a little brunch moment.”
A little brunch moment? That’s not language. That’s a cry for help from inside a ceramic coffee cup.
The funny part is that the techniques behind the food are often dead simple. Scrambled eggs? Gentle heat, salt, and not overcooking them into yellow insulation foam. Home fries? Parboil or use pre-cooked potatoes, then crisp them in a skillet with enough oil and patience to develop actual crust. French toast? Custard ratio matters: roughly 1 egg to 1/4 cup dairy, a little sugar, pinch of salt, cinnamon if you’re not a coward.
There. I just saved you forty-seven dollars and a waitlist.
The Cocktail Situation Is A Crying Shame
A mimosa is not a personality.
It is also not a serious drink. It’s orange juice in a tuxedo T-shirt. It says, “I’d like to day-drink, but make it seem like I own linen.”
And the worst part? Most brunch cocktails are lazy as hell.
Bottom-shelf sparkling wine. Orange juice from a sad plastic jug. A blood orange wheel hanging off the rim like it regrets being born. Charge fourteen dollars. Everybody clap.
Bloody Marys at least have ambition. They come in looking like a cold tomato-based threat. Spice, acid, savory depth, celery salt, Worcestershire, lemon, horseradish if the bartender fears God. That’s a drink with elbows.
But even Bloody Marys have been kidnapped by brunch culture and turned into vertical buffets. Shrimp, bacon, mini grilled cheese, pickled okra, half a slider, maybe a chicken wing balanced on top like the world’s dumbest wedding cake.
That’s not garnish. That’s unresolved trauma on a stick.
If your beverage needs scaffolding, we have lost the plot.
And don’t tell me brunch is fun because you can drink before noon. You know what else is fun? A cold beer after mowing the lawn. Champagne on New Year’s. A martini so dry it feels like legal advice. Morning alcohol is not inherently glamorous. Sometimes it’s just booze in better lighting.
Eggs Benedict Is the Mascot of False Luxury
Let’s talk about Eggs Benedict, the official state dish of pretending.
I love every component individually. Toasted English muffin? Gorgeous. Canadian bacon? Fine, weirdly polite ham, but welcome. Poached eggs? Delicious little sacks of tension. Hollandaise? One of the great sauces, when made fresh and held carefully.
But brunch restaurants treat Benedict like a status symbol when it is actually a timing nightmare held together by wishful thinking.
Poached eggs need precision. Not wizardry, precision. Simmering water, not a violent Jacuzzi. Fresh eggs help the whites hold shape. A little vinegar can tighten things up. About 3 to 4 minutes gets you tender whites and a runny yolk. Then serve immediately.
Immediately. That means now. Not after ten tickets and a flirtation with room temperature.
Hollandaise is an emulsion. Warm butter whisked into yolks with acid. Too hot and it scrambles. Too cool and it seizes like an anxious squirrel.
So what happens in a slammed brunch service with 80 tables of people taking photos before eating? You get one of three outcomes.
Best case: a decent Benedict.
Common case: overcooked yolks under split sauce.
Worst case: a lukewarm swamp on bread.
And then people post it online like they’ve discovered the lost city of yolk.
The Off-Rails Section: Brunch Is Basically A Real Estate Open House
Stay with me.
Nobody goes to an open house because they are calmly, rationally evaluating crown molding. They go to fantasize. To snoop. To project a better future onto a room that smells faintly like staged lemons.
That’s brunch.
Brunch is not about hunger. It is about aspiration with cutlery.
You don’t order shakshuka because it is the optimal egg delivery system, though a good shakshuka absolutely slaps. You order it because it arrives in a little pan looking like a Mediterranean life you almost deserve. Tomato sauce simmered with garlic, olive oil, cumin, paprika, maybe harissa if the kitchen has any courage. Eggs nestled right into the sauce until just set. Crusty bread for dragging through the whole thing like a rake through autumn. Gorgeous.
But at brunch, even that beauty gets drafted into image management.
Everybody becomes a temporary landlord of their own vibe. The sunglasses. The ceramics. The posed hand around the coffee cup. The studied nonchalance of someone saying, “I’m not that hungry, maybe we’ll share fries,” and then annihilating half the table like a raccoon in lip gloss.
I’m not saying people are fake.
I’m saying brunch is a room specifically designed to make normal people behave like unpaid brand ambassadors for their own lives.
And that’s exhausting.
Food should let you drop your shoulders. Brunch makes you sit up straighter for the camera.
What Brunch Gets Right, Damn It
Here’s the annoying part: the scam works because it contains shards of something lovely.
People want slow mornings. They want a meal that says the day is not yet ruined by email. They want company without the hard edges of dinner plans. They want coffee, something salty, something buttery, maybe something sweet, and the possibility that nothing urgent happens for a few hours.
That instinct is beautiful.
Humans need ceremonial laziness. We need meals that say, for a brief moment, you are not a machine with notifications.
But you do not need a hostess stand and a ninety-minute wait to get there.
Make pancakes at home and stop acting like this is impossible. Use buttermilk if you’ve got it. Don’t overmix; lumps are not a moral failure. Let the batter rest 10 minutes so the flour hydrates and the bubbles calm down. Cook on a medium griddle until the edges set and bubbles break on top, then flip once. Once. Not eight panicked times like you’re negotiating a hostage exchange.
Roast a sheet pan of bacon at 400°F so it cooks evenly without turning your stove into a grease crime scene. Crisp potatoes in cast iron. Soft-scramble eggs low and slow with butter until they look barely done, because carryover heat is real and eggs go from velvet to rubber faster than a bad date changes the subject.
Make a pot of coffee strong enough to forgive you.
Invite fewer people.
That’s the secret nobody monetizes because it doesn’t come with a QR-code menu: the best version of brunch is just a late breakfast where nobody is performing wealth, wellness, or desirability over roasted tomatoes.
The Real Proof That Brunch Is a Scam
Here’s my evidence.
When brunch goes well, what people actually love is not brunch.
It’s sitting. It’s laughing. It’s not rushing. It’s eating eggs with people you chose on purpose. It’s sunlight on the table. It’s one friend reaching for hot sauce before tasting anything because they are a degenerate and you love them anyway.
The actual good part is the pause.
Brunch gets credit for the emotional atmosphere created by having nowhere to be for two hours. That’s like giving a throw pillow credit for a healthy marriage.
If you served the exact same food at 8:15 a.m. in sweatpants, or at 1:30 p.m. after a walk, and removed the waitlist, the influencer lighting, the tiny salad nobody asked for, and the champagne flute full of citrus nonsense, most people would have a better time.
That’s the con.
Brunch sells relief from modern life, then adds modern life back in through reservations, crowds, inflated pricing, and social choreography.
It manufactures stress and calls the surviving of it indulgence.
That is elite scam behavior.
Still, I can’t fully hate it.
Because under the lacquer of nonsense, there’s a very human craving: we want meals that feel like permission. Permission to linger. Permission to be hungry without urgency. Permission to make the middle of the day soft around the edges.
So no, I don’t believe in brunch.
I believe in late eggs. Good coffee. Crispy potatoes. Buttered toast. Maybe a drink, if the day has that look in its eye.
I believe in feeding people before they become unbearable.
And I believe the best meals are the ones that make you feel, however briefly, that time is not hunting you.
Brunch didn’t invent that feeling.
It just put it on a menu and charged you twenty-six bucks.
