Round Table: Is Brunch Really for Jerks?

One of the greatest parts of The New York Times’ Sunday paper is that if you have access to a computer, you can read valuable chunks of it on a screen as early as the preceding Thursday. Where this might present a unique form of turmoil is when the content from said paper includes such headlines as “Brunch Is For Jerks.” As an entity that has commented on the proliferation of the very social event that David Shaftel, caller of the jerk, astutely points out has “spread like a virus from Sunday to Saturday,” but has neither stood firmly against nor for the spectacle of “conspicuous consumption,” Man Repeller is inclined to defend brunch.

Of course, though, anything can happen in the heat of a round table where participants extend beyond the individual — this particular individual being me, Leandra, who relishes laternoon eggs on a Saturday with an 11AM happy hour start time and not, as Shaftel suggests, to reject adulthood but rather because socializing with people who I like, for an extended period of time, in a recreational environment, energizes me.

Leandra Medine: That’s my thing with brunch. I like socializing with people who I like, which is important because socializing/parties can be work, as Glenn O’Brien said. Actually, as Andy Warhol said.

Kate Barnett: I feel like it has nothing to do with brunch. It has everything to do with gentrification, and it’s the same conversation that David Byrne was having when he said New York City wasn’t for artists anymore.

Amelia Diamond: I say, then why do you have to attack brunch? Why don’t you attack gentrification?

Charlotte Fassler: He’s arguing that brunch is an aspect of gentrification.

AD: I mean that Kate says she thinks it’s less about brunch and more about gentrification, I’m saying then argue about gentrification, and not brunch specifically.

LM: I think he’s using brunch as a portal to understand the effects of gentrification.

AD: So don’t use it! I’m gonna be less deep. Technically, I call brunch anything between the hours of breakfast and lunch. That’s where the B comes in. Who’s to say that I don’t have lunch at 3? I don’t like to be confined by the arms of a clock. Now, I think that brunch is the meal that would occur between breakfast and lunch. That’s all brunch is. If you’re eating a meal before 5 PM on a Sunday, it’s brunch. Before 6 PM. The food’s delicious. I wait all week on Seamless and pray that my favorite restaurants will put their egg options up.

LM: You’re talking about the act of eating, it’s actually about the food for you, whereas the article is arguing about what brunch has become, which is a social spectacle. And that’s why my argument is about how socializing recreationally energizes me. I like brunch because it’s an excuse to sit down with my brother for four hours on a Saturday and shoot shit.

AD: My argument is all about the food. I’ve gone to great brunches with terrible people and the good thing about brunch is that I’m eating the whole time, so I don’t have to participate in the conversation. Head down, I order 20 drinks… I recuperate and think about what happened the night before…

Cristina Couri: You’re all business.

AD: I’m all business at brunch.

LM: The other thing that we should take into consideration is that Amelia is the precise specimen of human the article is arguing against.

AD: I would like to point out that I think I earn my brunches because I wake up at 8 am and go to Connecticut and do a physical activity before half of the fellow brunch- goers have woken up.

KB: I’m sorry… You earn your brunches because you go to Connecticut to ride horses?

AD: I wake up and do a physical activity that takes thinking and strategy and strength. Do it while hung-over, often times I’ve just gone to bed three hours before, and then I come back and I think that I deserve a huge fucking meal in the same way that someone who just ran a marathon thinks they can eat a whole shitload of pasta.

CC: It’s your reward. It’s not like brunch is the leisure activity in and of itself.

AD: I just think that brunch is a time to eat.

Kayla Tanenbaum: I think you’re thinking of brunch as a meal while he’s thinking of brunch as a culture.

AD: I don’t see why that’s not okay to argue. I think he’s overthinking brunch. I don’t hate him for overthinking brunch because I overthink everything else otherwise I wouldn’t have anything to write about.

CF: I don’t like brunch because I don’t like eggs. I really like savory food, and so—

LM: You are also arguing for the literal form of brunch. You’re saying you don’ t like brunch because you don’t like eggs. It’s not that you don’t like brunch because you don’t like sitting at a table and communicating while eating with people

CC: That’s why I don’t like it.

AD: You don’t like brunch because you don’t like sitting around with family and friends? [Laughs]

CC: I like to make the most of my Saturdays and Sundays. It does turn into a whole four-hour thing… I like my weekends to be as productive as possible, to get my errands and everything done. I’d much rather catch up with friends during dinner or drinks during the week.

CF: I understand what you’re saying about understating brunch as an experience with socializing because it does remind me of when I studied abroad in France, and this woman would invite me to her home on Sundays for a meal which would essentially take up the entire day and was a huge five-course production. It was family time, and time for people to really be together. It was so nice and low stress. I found the brunch experience in New York to be a stressful one.

LM: How come?

CF: Because I feel like everywhere that serves brunch, if you go on peak brunch hours, is just teeming with people, it’s really hard to sit down, everyone is coordinating with other people, no one’s on time, people are hungover. It winds up being kind of a mess, then people are starving, people are cranky… I don’t find it to be that pleasant of an experience. You sit down and it’s loud, there are always drunk people around. I think that it doesn’t wind up being an enjoyable, leisurely meal.

KB: My only problem with brunch, taking out any social whatever that these people are putting into it, is that I have to wait a while. Actually sitting down with a bunch of people having a good meal and having it last for hours is fantastic. I don’t have any problem with that. That’s wonderful. The problem is that everyone else is also doing it.

AD: Why are long, leisurely, lazy brunches any different from a lazy dinner?

KT: I think it’s because brunch is more of a scene. There are all these Instagrams and hashtags

AD: I just don’t see how dinner’s not a scene.

CC: But that’s a different issue. That’s our foodie obsession, our culture’s obsession with food.

LM: I guess the other thing is that as Americans we do not understand moderation so everything that becomes a vague interest or disinterest is taken to the 110th power

KB: I think also the reason that brunch is kind of being attacked is because of the hedonistic air about it. You start drinking when you wake up… and he, as someone with a kid and whatever else, is less inclined to be generous towards that.

CF: I thought that line that he says rings true… where he says, “Worse than adolescent, it’s an adolescent’s idea of how adults spend their time.”

KB: But that’s fun.

LM: I am a little concerned about the direction in which society is moving. It seems to be much less about people enjoying themselves and much more about them taking take of themselves. Just because I’m the kind of person who is joie-de-vive-ish, I like to know that I can have fun whenever I want to without feeling guilty. It frustrates me that even as a 25 year-old girl I feel, definitely self-inflicted, but still pressure to stop drinking because I know it will better for me if I don’t think. That gets on my nerves.

KB: That is not the direction I thought you were headed.

LM: I think this argument about brunch is –

AD: Anti-hedonism.

LM: I’m not necessarily on board for hedonism, either.

KT: I feel like the author is talking as if all these people who are having brunch are somehow trying to convert him into being a brunch-goer. If you don’t want to have brunch, you don’t want to have brunch.

AD: To his point, to play devil’s advocate, I understand that if he does live in the West Village — so do I — it’s annoying as someone who can’t go restaurants I like between certain hours because there’s a line. That’s annoying to me, and I definitely always say I feel like I don’t dress up on the weekends anymore because I can’t stand all of the people who look like they put on an outfit to go eat. That’s just the nature of being cranky in your environment and shaking the kids off your porch with a broom.

KB: It’s like “not in my backyard” but instead of it being crime and poverty, it’s yuppies.

AD: Yeah, totally.

CC: And brouhaha.

AD: I don’t mind the brouhaha. It makes me feel alive. I like the noise and I like the people around, I like that my neighborhood feels alive. It’s definitely more that I can’t get a reservation.

LM: Well it’s also frustrating because the people populating the neighborhood aren’t the people who live there.

KT: But some people want to have a brunch, they want to have the Sex and the City feel in the West Village on a Sunday afternoon.

LM: The thing about the West Village, specifically, it seems to be where the people who come to NY and settle in Murray Hill graduate to. All those people have been able to graduate from Murray Hill and make enough money to move into the West Village, so that’s what they’re doing. It’s sort of become, this emblem for New York transience.

AD: Or fucking Paris, depending on which street you live on. I don’t think there needs to be a solution. What is the solution? Banning brunch?

LM: I’m thinking an intellectual solution. I don’t mean literally.

AD: But what is the intellectual solution? The intellectual solution is that Darwinism is going to occur all on its own. A social Darwinism might occur and all the people who move out of Manhattan because they got so fed up with it, eventually those people are going to move out of the brunch scene. Maybe it’s gonna be about tea time next, maybe will café culture will come back.

KT: I feel like the people who don’t eat brunch are the people who used to eat brunch and don’t like the fact that the people who now eat brunch aren’t exactly cool. It’s a very exclusive thing to not like brunch; just like this guy saying New York has changed isn’t a mindful conversation about gentrification. It’s really just his saying he was there before it was cool.

AD: I was talking to a friend yesterday, and she went to school in Rhode Island and was saying Rhode Island doesn’t have sandwiches, which is a funny concept. But even sandwiches had their trendy moment in food history, and I’m sure there was someone who was like, “ugh, everything’s a sandwich these days.” Maybe that’s when lunch was big. It sounds funny but it’s true. I’m sure sandwiches were a trending food.

CF: People might tire of brunch the same way there is a culture surrounding happy hour, but it’s just blended into something that people do, and it isn’t this big production.

AD: Happy hour is such an interesting thing to compare it to because it’s an off time. I’m sure it was trending at some point.

LM: It had to have been. The only difference is that we didn’t have access to all of these social utilities that galvanize everything we do.

KB: They’re both born of the same idea of restaurants, as far as trying to make money. The reason brunch is a thing is because there’s a huge supply. There’s much more demand, but every restaurant has brunch because they realize they can make a ton of money off of it.

AD: I think what Leandra said is interesting because what actually made brunch annoying is the Instagramming, the tweeting, the checking in, the sort of qualifying your social status by where you ate that morning. I agree that that’s the annoying part of it. All the trendy restaurants have things in front of them that are begging you to Instagram: those little chalkboards, and Jeffrey’s has that thing in front of it that I’ve seen all over my newsfeed where you can put your head through the bodies. So maybe, if you’re asking for a social solution, just like you said you think it’s happening with fashion week, and we talked about this people who go for work and are going to go anyway, you can’t stop going to Fashion Week because it’s not cool anymore—it’s just going to stop being cool to Instagram it, tweet about it, or brag about it. People aren’t going to stop eating brunch but they’re going to stop making a big deal out of it.

CF: I already feel like I see less people Instagramming food, at least the people that I follow, or even my own. When Instagram started, there were certain things they felt were what qualified an Instagram.

KT: And now those same things are embarrassing to Instagram.

CT: Right. I used to Instagram food, I remember.

LM: I Instagram food when I’m the one who made it. That’s much more a testament to my wanting to show people that I’m good at stuff.

AD: I wonder if the next realm is home cooking, like dinner parties are going to become a thing again.

LM: I had a dinner party on Sunday night; none of you guys were invited.

KT: I feel like if everyone treated brunch the way Amelia and Charlotte did, as a meal and as an opportunity to spend time with your friends, no one would find it annoying. It’s the fact that people are so vocal about their brunch.

AD: Totally, Kayla. My argument to most things in life is that if people treated them the way I did the world would be a better place.

KB: I don’t think that’s true necessarily, because I think it’s the actual people who are doing those things.

KT: If there’s an annoying drunk girl at a restaurant and I don’t hear about it, I don’t care. It’s when it’s my friend’s friend who she met on a teen tour that pops up on my feed it’s like, “Come on! I’m really excited about your eggs benedict.”

KB: If you’re walking around outside and every place is spilling out with these groups of people that may be completely content and look like they are having a wonderful time, but they also kind of look like assholes, then your attitude towards the institution is going to change.

LM: I have a problem with this desire to reject adulthood. What’s wrong with people deciding not to feel like adults one day per week? Peter Pan proliferated for a reason. Hellooo!? Duh. Durrr. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills here.

CF: I feel like a common argument that we’ve read over and over again about this whole millennial generation is that people seem less inclined to grow up and take on mature responsibilities or what it’s seen as a basic way as social responsibilities. They’re much more supported, and loved in a way, that almost hinders them from growing up and toughening up.

KT: But there’s a lot of stuff feeding into that. A lot of people don’t move out of their parents’ house because they can’t afford it, because they can’t get jobs.

LM: I think the bottom line here, with this brunch story is that what this author doesn’t realize is that he’s calling for exactly what is going to continue to allow brunch to exists in the medium that it exists now, which is saying that it’s out of fashion.

AD: He’s doing what everyone says, which is what Kayla was saying, if you don’t like it, don’t eat it.

KT: Did you see that line where he says brunch is alienating people from their nuclear and extended families?

AD: That’s dramatic. I think it’s interesting though, what he’s saying, he’s 40 and he has a kid. I just read a weird thing on a Mommy blog that my friend posted who has kids, and all her friends with kids liked it. It was about how going out to eat is not fun and it’s very stressful because it adds this element of one more activity where I’m seen as the bad friend because I’m hanging out with my kids. Maybe he feels pressure on that end.

LM: I think his point was just that brunch should not be an excuse to continue to live by the guidelines of that hashtag “pics or it didn’t happen.” He’s not saying damn you if you don’t have a family and fuck your friends, too. He’s saying that if Sundays are traditionally reserved for families and your family is doing something, don’t reject that plan just because your friends are going to brunch and you don’t want to miss out — even though after your night last night you can’t exactly afford a $50 meal.

KB: I feel like he’s just using it as a vehicle to point out gentrification, demographic shift… And the reason he’s writing about it is because it’s a clever way to have the conversation. It will get people talking because they’ll think he’s attacking brunch. He’s really attacking the changes in his neighborhood.

KT: I feel like he needs to be more direct about that because the gentrification argument is one worth having.

AD: Uh, I have a question. Hasn’t the West Village been pretty gentrified for a few years? I’m pretty sure the West Village gentrified when Giuliani kicked all the homeless people out.

CC: All I see is that Café Gitane avocado toast. I think that’s the most Instagrammed brunch.

LM: Yes. People love sharing photos of avocado toast. But whatever, you know? Let them shoot toast. Who cares.

Image via Phoebe Lettice