How to Brunch without Fucking Up

A few easy tips and admonishments to improve your brunching experience:

  1. Know your area.  How can you know where the good restaurants are if you don’t?  Do some research to help expand your knowledge.  Places like The Internet can tell you a bajillion useful things, such as how awesome other people think your local diner is and that it closed three years ago.  Wandering around town and complaining about a lack of brunch places is not an acceptable substitute for this.
  2. Avoid the rush. One of the biggest complaints I’ve seen about brunch is that the wait is soooooo long because hipsters and their damn skinny jeans took my spot!  Dude, regardless of how tight the jeans on the forty people in front of you in line are, they are all there for the same reason: tasty food.  Do not go at peak brunch time (often a 11) and then bitch about other people wanting to eat.  Go back to the internet, see when the place opens, and next time go earlier or later.  Yelp posters will definitely tell you when no tables will be free just as surely as someone will give a great place one star because their water was only refilled fifty times.
  3. Know your allergies and dietary needs. Brunch is fab but very high in gluten, allergens, and meat.  Again, internet it and possibly call ahead if you have serious dining concerns to make sure your chosen restaurant can feed you safely as well as deliciously.
  4. Try new shit. I know my other points can be boiled down to “Seriously, look at the internet first,” but this one lies within each of us.  Loosen up.  Try a new place.  Try a new meal!  Be prepared to love it, hate it, or forever have a new embarrassing story to tell you friends. Go as slow as blueberry and banana pancakes or all the way to the french toast burger.  But seriously, try something new every so often.

And for the love of challah, stop complaining about things that you can easily fix with the supercomputer in your pocket.

I Have Maple-Flavored Feelings

There are a million things that can go wrong in the world, and many of them occur at brunch.  Long lines, small tables, and non-perfect food.  No one eats breakfast/lunch food out if it’s not going to be perfect, guys.  We can all make pancakes and sandwiches, can’t we?  If we wanted non-perfect food, we’d stay home.  We go out to brunch for the awesome.  For the amazing.  For the they-really-put-all-those-things-in-one-thing? turning out to be the BEST FOODSTUFF EVER.  Or maybe we just go out for really good eggs in the company of hipsters and kitsch.

Regardless, as a New Englander I feel strongly that the worst brunch faux pass is not having real maple syrup.

High fructose corn syrup with “maple flavoring” is NOT maple syrup people.  For some, it is a travesty because corn subsidies and it makes you fat or whatever else.  This is not my point.  Mine is that maple syrup is the nectar of the breakfast gods and I refuse to eat your dry-ass pancakes without some liquid nirvana making them palatable.  Real syrup upgrades BACON.  I come to brunch for many things, but first among them is the boiled-down blood of the sugar maple.  If I am not one step away from being a tree vampire, it is not brunch time.  That makes it lunch time, because at least with a grilled cheese sandwich I do not feel inherently betrayed by the lack of syrup.  I am also not a fan of paying extra for real syrup, but as long as it’s not five bucks I’ll do it because I know the good stuff costs.

Also: Grade B is the best grade and we other New England states have let Vermonters pull the maple wool over our eyes for too long.  And they know their syrup.  They want fake syrup passed off as the real thing to be a prosecutable offense.