My fellow San Franciscans,
One of our most cherished institutions is under attack. Those who would stand against us are not coming for our bread bowls, our lukewarm park Tecates, our music-festival lamb poutine. They're coming for something far more integral to the fabric of our city. They're coming for our brunch. And we cannot let them win.
There have always been those who did not hear brunch's siren song — those who stood by and made snide remarks about powdered eggs, indifferent servers, and the inevitable implosion that comes in the wake of bottomless mimosas. There are those who call brunch a waste of time, a frivolity, an activity reserved for the very young or the very irresponsible.
But as citizens of the greatest congregation of brunches on Earth, we know that to focus on the negatives is to miss out on the very real pleasures of this all-important weekend ritual. We know that no one who has encountered the ambrosial brown sugar bacon at Foreign Cinema or Sweet Woodruff, dipped breakfast pizza crust into molten egg yolk at Beretta, or gazed into the magenta depths of Bar Tartine's candied beet mimosa could question the necessity of this hallowed tradition.
Recent months have brought a new, more insidious attack against the midday meal. The first blow came from the north, in the form of a polemic called The Trouble With Brunch. When Torontonian Shawn Micallef looks at brunch, he sees nothing more than a performance of leisure, a literal form of conspicuous consumption perpetuated by the "brunching class." He wonders: "Why were my fellow brunchers ... squandering their precious free time on something as onerous and chronically unsatisfying as this midday meal?"
We could forgive Micallef these baseless accusations because we pity him and his foreignness. A Canadian may never understand that being an American means that we can douse our hangovers however we choose, whether with a frosty michelada and nopales chilaquiles at San Jalisco, a hearty sausage-and-dumpling plate and a stein of cold beer at Suppenküche, or a Dungeness crab Benedict and goblet-sized mimosa at Mission Beach Cafe.
But Micallef's appalling misconceptions spread through the porous borders of the internet and caught the attention of New Yorker David Shaftel, who penned an op-ed for The New York Times entitled "Brunch is for Jerks." In this dangerous screed he calls brunch a symptom of the shiftlessness and entitlement of the younger generation, and smugly declares that he is out of the brunch game forever. "Now that I see brunch for what it is — conspicuous consumption disguised as urbanity — I can't enjoy it," he writes, congratulating himself on his misguided opinion.
What Shaftel and others miss is that brunch has always been an indulgence, always belonged to the young, always functioned as a secular Sunday activity for members of the church of good food and drink. The portmanteau itself is thought to come from British student slang, and its earliest known appearance in print, an 1895 article in Hunter's Weekly, proposed the meal as a hangover reliever. "Instead of England's early Sunday dinner, a post-church ordeal of heavy meats and savory pies, why not a new meal, served around noon, that starts with tea or coffee," explained New York Times restaurant critic William Grimes in a 1997 story investigating the origins of the meal. "By eliminating the need to get up early on Sunday, brunch would make life brighter for Saturday night carousers."
We need to show our enemies that they have brunch all wrong; that it is not a performance but an enjoyable and often necessary act of renewal and reinvigoration.
We need to fight for the right to eat fried chicken in the morning in all its colors and creeds, whether at Farmerbrown with a side of waffles, or at Brenda's French Soul Food with a side of crawfish beignets, or at Namu Gaji with a side of kimchi.
We need to ensure that Bloody Marys of all flavors are treated with equal respect, whether made with Worcestershire at The Ramp, wasabi at St. Mary's Pub, or aged balsamic at Zuni Cafe.
We need to continue expanding our horizons along with our waistlines with vinegary Filipino sausages and Burma Coolers at B*Star, egg-stuffed dosas and mango mimosas at Dosa, and miso-glazed trout and sake at Nojo.
Because we know that we don't brunch to be seen by others; we brunch to be with others. Who among us has not stood among fellow citizens at Nopa's bar on a Sunday morning, angling for a stool and a bite of that sublimely custardy French toast, and not felt that he or she was participating in an essential part of San Francisco life?
Let this be the line drawn in the powdered sugar. Go out this weekend and brunch, for yourself and for your city.
Thank you and good morning, or, perhaps, good afternoon.
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