Brunch Is For Assholes

This was about five years ago—I was in New York City, and some of my hoity-toity friends invited me out to brunch. They said were going to the best brunch spot in the city. You know how New York is—everyone has to go to the best everything, the best bars, the best restaurants, the best banana pudding. Then, after a few months, people will get bored with it and move onto the new best thing.

So we were going to the best brunch spot in NYC. My hotel was around Grand Central, and I had to take a cab downtown. So I’m in the cab, sort of contemplating how I got to this point in my life, where I am going out to the best brunch spot on a cloudy Saturday morning in New York City. The cab pulls up about a block away from the restaurant, and as I open the car door, a guy goes sprinting down the sidewalk. This guy was running like Ben Johnson on HGH, picking them up and putting them down, and my assumption was that he was being chased, that he stole a toothbrush or something from Duane Reade and the cops had him in hot pursuit.

So as I walk down the street, I spy the restaurant, and there is a line of a hundred people—maybe more—extending out the door and down the sidewalk. The sprinter was at the end of the line, completely winded. The dude was literally in a dead sprint so he could go to brunch. After a while, my friends show up, and they get in line with me, and we’re standing in line for well upwards of an hour, at which point someone from the restaurant comes out, draws an imaginary line in the air in front of the sprinter guy, and tells everyone behind the imaginary line to go home—full for the day.

The sprinter starts jumping up and down, smashing his hands on an invisible table, yelling “DAMMIT! DAMMIT!” My friends were pretty busted up about it, too. They were fancy people, from the Hamptons. Out of ideas, we went to a gross diner down the street, and everyone complained about it.

This is a very New York story, of course, very Seinfeld-ian, because only in New York could someone be driven to a violent rage by not being able to get brunch. But some people are crazy about brunch. It’s this whole social scene, where you dress up in your finest and sit around and drink mimosas and gossip and get drunk and eat avocado toast. What a dumb fucking ritual. There is a class element to this—brunch is for the leisure class, right out of Veblen’s conspicuous consumption—we have all this free time to waste three hours on a weekend and get shitfaced, slowly sozzled on Bloody Marys, and spend the rest of the day sitting on the couch, sobering up small, before the Sunday Scaries set in. A waste of a day. Only people with really easy lives can waste a whole day on the weekend. It offends my blue-collar sensibilities, not that I get my hands dirty, but on the weekend, I’m doing shit, running errands and writing and scooping the poop, not spending an entire morning socializing. Hey—you can get drunk anytime you want—you don’t have to bring eggs into it.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to write another thousand words on brunch. I mean, it is what it is. You can pay $22 for a piece of toast if you want to, there are markets in everything. In a previous essay, I wrote about the Hamptons. The people who live in the Hamptons are the same people who like brunch. They are cake-eaters. Not that everyone who goes to brunch is a decamillionaire—lots of people who go to brunch are going to have an overdraft on their debit card when they pay for it. For them, it is aspirational luxury. They want to be like the folks in the Hamptons. It is an upper-class thing to do. Going to McDonald’s is a lower-class thing to do. I have eaten at McDonald’s over a thousand times and I’ve had brunch two times. It’s the people you despised in college, the Chads and Brads and Muffys and—gee, what is another high-class white girl name? Aisling, or something like that. Aisling will wear her Hermes scarf to brunch, one of ten she has in her closet. Yes, the prose is dripping with condescension.

Wealth takes many forms in the United States. You have high school dropouts who start HVAC companies and sell them after ten years for four times revenue for $10-20 million and live in a gated community. My people. Then you have the strivers, the poor kids who aced the SATs and got into a great school, got a great job, and did something great. My people. Then you have the scions, whose families went to great schools, their kids got in as legacy admissions, they were thoughtless mediocrities, got the same great jobs as the strivers did, and made even more money because of their connections. Not my people. Those are the people at brunch. A striver or a high school dropout would not think of going to brunch—they don’t value social climbing, and they have better things to do, and they’re not going to spend $22 on a piece of toast, and they’re not going to spend $22 on a Bloody Mary with a piece of celery, bacon, and a shrimp in it. Lehman Brothers had a mix of strivers and legacy kids. I had a king-size chip on my shoulder, and basically wanted to beat up all the legacy kids, but over time, I got to be friends with them, and learned a few things, too. Like: the social stuff is important. They were much better able to navigate the politics at the firm than I was. But I absolutely abhor the cake eater culture.

Here is a partial list of things that brunch eaters like, in no particular order:

·      Taking a year off

·      Ugly sweater parties

·      Mad Men

·      Yoga!

·      Pilates!!

·      Soulcycle!!!

·      Ray Ban Wayfarers

·      Picking blueberries

·      TED talks

·      Pea coats

·      Lacrosse (of course)

·      Also hockey

·      Santorini

·      The Amalfi Coast

·      Michelin-starred restaurants

·      Padron (in 2006)

·      Voss (in 2006)

·      Brunch, brunch, and more brunch

I’m really not much in the mood to eat at 10 in the morning on a weekend. I’m not much in the mood to eat in the morning, ever. I skip breakfast. If I eat at 10, then I’m starving at 4, and dinner isn’t until 6, or later. It throws off my body clock. Whenever I’m at brunch, it feels as though I’ve been detained by the police, being forced to answer questions against my will.  You know what’s better than brunch? A pancake house. Myrtle Beach has dozens of them, and they’re terrible. That’s what makes them so good. I used to go to Harry’s Pancake House in Myrtle Beach for a while. All the waitresses were 35, going on 60, smokers, and grandmothers, too. It’s awesome. The white people in Myrtle Beach are nothing if not fecund. Better than having some bat-faced girl from Greenpoint, communist, pouring your coffee as if she hates your very existence. Brunch has never been a positive experience for me. But to the brunchers, they are oblivious to all of this, because it is the only socially acceptable time to drink before noon. And then when you think about it: you are drinking before noon. Whether it is socially acceptable or not really makes no difference.

I’m also very much opposed to being seen. Having to be seen at the best brunch spot with these particular people. The right people. You might recall that book from Wednesday Martin a few years ago, Primates of Park Avenue. An anthropologist living on the Upper East Side had some observations about culture and class in the UES. She is a horrendous human being (I can’t say why here), but she was a pretty darn good cultural critic. I haven’t even gotten into parents with kids. They all have to have the right stroller, and it costs half a month’s rent. For a while, every baby in New York had one of those rubber giraffes, until those went out of style, and then they all had to have some other toy. If you didn’t have the giraffe, you weren’t in the in crowd. You were a bad parent. It’s an arms race, trying to get into the best pre-schools. Admissions interviews for 3-year-olds. And they crazy thing is, they all think it is normal.

So fuck brunch in the left ear. Fuck you and your avocado toast. And absolutely fuck your life that allows you the time to waste an entire weekend trying to look cool.  You may think you’re cool, but you’re not that cool.