Brunch — What is the point?

I've always hated brunch. The feeling of brunching is like washing yourself with a washcloth that doesn't get sudsy enough. It's frustrating. It's frustrating because you feel like when you arrive at brunch, starving because you haven't yet eaten breakfast (making room for brunch in your belly), you must choose between true breakfast food like pancakes and lunch food like salad. But you want both! You want both because you've had neither yet and it's already 3 p.m. You know, deep in your heart, that stuffing yourself with pancakes at 3:30 p.m. is wrong. And yet brunch law says that it's ok. But it's not ok.

The other thing I hate about brunch is its pace. You feel like you have to sit around, sit around, sit around, chew...slowly, sip slowly, talk slowly. Everything feels foggy and lazy and so....Sunday afternoon. I don't want to be reminded that it's Sunday afternoon, the saddest day of the week. The day before the workweek begins, the last day of the weekend. I want to lounge in bed late, shuffle over to the kitchen and make my instant coffee with a heaping of creamer, eat in front of my computer, crumbs falling everywhere, in my t-shirt, sleep still in my eyes. Instead, I'm sitting in some restaurant, trying to look awake and interested, surrounded by other lazy brunchers eating the kitchen's leftovers.

Yes, leftovers. I always suspected that brunch food is not the freshest food on the menu, and recently learned that I was right. In the restaurant business, brunch actually makes chefs downright angry. As one former chef describes: "I hate the friggin' sound of the word Brunch. It's a nice way to sell off your old leftovers, scraps, rejects, stuff on the verge of going bad and outright trash covered with a bit of Hollandaise to the gullible."

And finally, by the time you're done with brunch it's nearly 5 p.m., sometimes later. Dinner is just around the corner. But you don't want to think about food again. And yet you have to, because brunch is dinner's long shadow, always too close behind.