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(Photo: Mac Premo/TueNight)

Here’s Why Brunch Is the Absolute Worst

Brunch is cancelled until further notice. (Photo: Mac Premo/TueNight)

What I’m about to say may sound indelicate, impolitic or even impure, but here goes: fuck brunch.

Brunch is the absolute worst. If breakfast is the most important meal of the day, brunch is the least important, most overhyped, overblown and overindulgent meal of all time. It combines two of my least favorite things (sitting too close to other New Yorkers and paying too much for eggs) into one undeservingly grandiose food event. Brunch doesn’t need the foolhardy pomp and circumstance and gratuitous excess of a Monster Truck rally. It’s just a plate of eggs, y’all. Let’s all calm down.

Now, don’t go befouling your boy shorts. Just know that I truly believe that brunch is for sucker emcees and basics. It’s easily the biggest racket of the post-industrial modern age (next to thigh-firming creams — might as well rub a half-dozen hot glazed Krispie Kremes all over your legs because same/same.) Why spend $18 on two eggs when you know how many eggs $18 will get you from the grocery store?

APPROXIMATELY THIS MANY EGGS, MORE OR LESS!

eggs

Or, if you spend it on a hen, you get INFINITY FREE EGGS. Seriously, buy yourself a hen and brunch is free until that thing wanders off into the forest to die of exhaustion after years of pumping out breakfast for your broke ass.

Brunch totally exploits your New York-y overwillingness to pay for social construct and bullshit context. For example, say you buy a hard-boiled egg from a bodega. That’s a smooth 50 cents. You eat it, you go on with your life. So why are you willing to wait 45 minutes for a tiny table and virtually the same egg experience and spend, like, TWENTY DOLLARS! That is a markup of approximately 3,900%! Now I’m no Stephen Hawking mathlete, but I’m pretty sure you’re being robbed.

My household is, needless to say, not a brunch household. We go out only if we have out-of-town guests in and they insist. (We’re not MONSTERS…OK, we are.) Then we quietly control+alt+del them from our lives. (Because we’re definitely monsters.) Friends occasionally remark that they’re surprised we’ve managed to save money living in New York. Wanna know how we did it? Financial pro tip: STOP GOING TO BRUNCH. You know what we did with the money we saved on brunch? We bought a zoo. And filled it with hens.

Seriously, buy yourself a hen and brunch is free until that thing wanders off into the forest to die of exhaustion after years of pumping out breakfast for your broke ass.

FURTHERMORE, sweet sassy molassy, why in the name of the late, great hyperbolic wordsmith Stuart Scott would I want to WAIT IN LINE to surround myself with gabbing, gobbling girls clinking mimosas and posting photos to their annoying social media platform of choice and hashtagging #brunchlife or #justmeandthegirls or #brunchbunch, screeching about being “OBSESSED” so regularly you could chart your ovulation around it and bedraggled, bespectacled bros prattling on about “finally really getting meditation” or “disruption” or “storytelling” when I could be at home on my couch NOWHERE NEAR THOSE TERRIBLE HUMANS?

So, let’s see. Massively overpriced basic breakfast food covered in runny yolk; the boring, deafening din of fellow humans; what else, what else…

Oh yeah: Take a look at a fucking brunch menu. EVERY SINGLE THING on it is an overpriced version of shit you could make for a fraction of the cost using pantry staples like BREAD. WAKE UP AND SMELL THE MARK UP ON BACON, AMERICA! You know why there have been no major innovations in brunch? (Save the ingenious Rooty Tooty Fresh ‘N Fruity®…also how fucking high must those IHOP execs have been when a consensus was reached that, yes, the name Rooty Tooty Fresh ‘N Fruity® would suffice? HOW MUCH RICH MAN’S ASPIRIN DID YOU SNORT, 1980s IHOP EXECS? You done hoovered that gak like the wide neck-tied breakfast version of Tony Montana, and, BY GOD, it worked.) BECAUSE BRUNCH IS JUST LAME PANTRY STAPLES: eggs (which I’m pretty sure we covered, right?), milk, coffee, flour. You’re overpaying for shit you could get at any given gas station. You think you’re all Beyoncé Goes to Balthazar, but really you’re straight-up rolling through 7-11 in a bathing suit and flip-flops. Metaphorically speaking.

Try this: Open a box of simple store-brand cereal or an Activia mini, sit at home in silence and think about what you did.

Because, in the end, we get the brunch we think we deserve. And we’re all willing to settle – and pay – for a pointlessly ritualized dumpster-fire of a morning meal: fancied-up Wonder Bread; over-decorated Bisquick and platters of overvalued, over-salted, hot-buttered American breakfast trash.

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Tell Us in the Comments

What do you think?

5 Responses

  1. Sara Gilliam
    Sara G

    Love it. Rich man’s aspirin. Thanks for a great read.

    Reply
  2. LP

    Hahahahaha! This is awesome! SF is exactly the same.. I NEVER go to brunch here. No patience for it at all!

    Reply
  3. Amanda Roe

    Seriously. It’s over the top here in Portlandia. Love you, girl. Hate brunch though.

    Reply
    • LP

      Ha! Just like the ‘Brunch’ episode on the show Portlandia….art imitates life!

      Reply

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