Brunch: The Dumbest, Worst Meal

I'm pretty sure brunch was invented in 1962, when some restaurant owner in Tallahassee said, "Serving breakfast 24 hours a day would be a pain in the ass — mostly since we never even serve breakfast — but I do hate my kitchen staff and I've been meaning to get rid of them. So we'll serve breakfast sorta near lunchtime, and we'll call it brunch and everyone who comes in to eat brunch will be a hungover dick. And we'll refuse to offer the regular lunch menu so that diners are even more pissed, and we'll put booze in all the orange juice so we ruin cocktails at the same time, and we'll charge normal prices, but people will still bitch because they'll be all, 'It's just eggs!' and they won't be entirely wrong because the menu will mostly be just eggs and jokes about eggs and by noon, everyone will quit. This is such a good idea that surely other restaurant owners will copy it for decades to come."

For all you brunch-sympathizers, please don't confuse my brunch hate for food hate. I love food. And I believe with all of my being that brunch is trying to steal food from me. Brunch is trying to convince me that two separate meals should count as one. By taking breakfast and lunch and mashing them together, brunch thinks I won't notice it's trying to steal a meal from my day. I see you, brunch. You try to shut my mouth with popovers and strawberry butter and sometimes it works, but I still hate you as much as someone can hate a meal concept. 

You just never really know when or where brunch is going to show up and then suddenly, you're mid-conversation with someone, and Brunch elbows in and is like, "LET'S MIX IT UP,  Y'ALLS!! YEAH!! LET'S GO CRAZY ON EGGS FOR A COUPLE HOURS, AND LET'S HEARTBURN THIS MOTHER UP WITH SOME ALCOHOLIC-ED BEVERAGES! WHO'S IN? YOU? THAT GUY? THAT GUY IS TOTALLY IN. RIGHT, GUY? NO? C'MON, GUY!" 

Oh, and don't think I don't slow clap you for your clever breakfast + lunch name combo. I have to admit that you're smart. I know your ad team had to have come up with a thousand name combo options, and when they suggested "leakfast," you were like, "NO WAY!" And then they were all, "What about 'bunch'?" And you were like, "Too easy." And when they tried to pass off "leakfunchst" as an option, you slapped them. And then they came up with a name that was perfectly monosyllabic and would run right off the tongue of someone mid-walk-of-shame: brunch. And you knew you had every college student by their college student balls. "Uptown won't know what hit it."
I will give brunch credit for celebrating bloody marys, though. High fives to whoever put vodka in the gazpacho. I can absolutely get behind the idea of putting booze in cold soup, but why stop with bloody marys? Where's the vodka in my vichyssoise? How about whiskey-blasting the nasty out of some broccoli cheese soup? The bloody mary is the only brunch beverage I fully support. It is my sincere hope that it blazes a cold-soup-as-booze-beverage trail in 2016.

Mimosas, however, can just shut the hell up and go back to the baby shower they came from.

Brunch also frequently likes to take advantage of buffets. One thousand omelet farts upon you, buffets. Buffets appeal to my desire to Eat All The Everything, but in practice always produce sadness. Firstly, I'm not in your restaurant looking to walk. My FuelBand's only going to be logging fork-to-face workouts in this next few minutes. Secondly, I am not good at plating, which is why I like to go to restaurants and let a professional plate the foods for me. Thirdly, buffets like to include those build-your-own anything stations. If I wanted to build my meal myself, I would have bought a Skilsaw and a box of Froot Loops. Instead, I came to Jeff's House of Food because I'd like to trade dollars for delicious. Please, just make it so. Without buffets and without this build-your-owning. And call it breakfast, lunch or dinner while you're at it, for bloody mary's sake.