Oh, let’s go out for a nice Sunday brunch! they said. I should have shot myself first. Instead, I said, OK, why not?
They knew just the right place, they said, very cool and with great food. I should have feigned a coronary occlusion and insisted on remaining behind to rest. Instead, I said, Sounds fine to me.
I sure can make bad choices sometimes.
For some folks, Sunday brunch might elicit visions of sunlit terraces overlooking wooded valleys, glasses of fresh-squeezed orange juice accompanying enticing whole-grain pancakes and fresh organic fruit, perhaps an exquisite little omelet stuffed with artisan sausages, imported gouda, and fragrant whole basil. Or perhaps the vision might be one of a comfy family restaurant, everybody seated in a half-circle in a commodious vinyl-cushioned booth, a coffeepot on the table always kept filled and a 20-page menu filled with every possible variety of pancake imaginable to the human mind.
But that isn’t the reality of Sunday brunch in the neighborhoods of San Francisco. Here, Sunday brunch is an hour in Hell, preceded by another hour waiting outside on a rank piss-soaked urban sidewalk, forced to listen to the inane gabble of grungy 20-somethings with magenta hair and striped leggings, freezing in the blasts of fog-cooled air, hungry, bored, impatient, and irritated.
You wait and you wait. Eventually you make it to the front door of that very cool place with its 12 rickety tables, its cracked linoleum floor, its dingy lighting, its pathetically ungifted "neighborhood" artwork on the wall. You are greeted by the teenaged prison matron who appraises you with the calculating eye of the madam of a slum whorehouse. You sit stuffed elbow-to-elbow at the undersized table, crammed next to four hysterical young females, two of whom with faces glued to their cell phones and one of whom laughs with a screechy WHEEEEEEAAAAAAAAA every few minutes. There is no water or silverware on the suspiciously sticky table, just a cardboard box containing the usual packets of sugar and substitutes. And a nearly-opaque plastic diner-type salt shaker with a dented top.
The room is crowded, suffocating, smelly, smoky. The two waitresses stride around with such grim determination you would think that their every move is being tracked by a sniper’s rifle—and indeed it may be, figuratively speaking. Their job is not to be pleasant or welcoming or courteous. Their job is to take your order, serve the food, and get you out of there as fast as humanly possible. They are still youngsters, these waitresses, no doubt recent escapees from some sanitary suburb elsewhere, and they are desperate to fit into what they consider to be big-city glamour. Thus they out-Goth, out-hair-dye, out-silly-legging, out-clumpy-shoes, out-ugly-eyewear, out-pierce, out-attitude, out-grimace, and out-sullen even the grungiest of the Valencia Street crowd that sits while they stand.
They’re lousy at their jobs, even allowing for the desperate stress levels engendered by the bizarre overcrowding and impossibility of their ever taking a moment’s rest. They’re too young to understand that by slowing down ever so slightly, giving themselves a moment to focus, they will actually wind up being more efficient. Instead, their hard determination covers a raging mental torrent of confusion and they screw up left and right, adding to the general air of slapdash chaos. It probably doesn’t help any that the kitchen is staffed by an Al Qaeda cell, bearded, jabbering and sweat-streaked at the griddle behind the waitress station.
Coffee mediocre in a cracked cup. I typically prefer some cream or half-and-half but I wouldn’t trust anything dairy from this joint. Despite her masquerade of militaristic punctilio our pierced goddess takes her good sweet time to take our order and Al Qaeda there in the back seems to thrive on noisy but shambling incompetence. The food finally arrives—although one of our table’s orders is mangled—and what is presented is ordinary breakfast-y stuff, egg things and bread things and meat things and potato things, identical to the fare at a Denny’s in rural Mississippi. No: I take that back. Your average Denny’s would be ashamed to serve the brown-lump home fries that accompanied my mediocre omelet. I left the piled plate of vaguely organic material mostly uneaten. Not only was the food offputting, I was nauseated by the heat, the stench, the noise, the feeling of being a steer amongst a herd of cattle, all with our snouts shoved into the antibiotic-laced corn mash in our rusted-steel feed trough. Inhuman, inhumane, unbearable, the simple act of sharing a meal made into a walking nightmare of indignity and offense. And I was expected to pay them for this ordeal.
My first time out to brunch in years. It will be my last either forever or until a sea change takes place in San Francisco brunch-ing. I won’t hold my breath, though. This is a great city for dinner. But San Francisco sucks major doo-doo when it comes to breakfast and brunch.
In my opinion the problem stems from city life versus suburbia. The older, more affluent people who can afford those comfortable sunlit terrace restaurants, or who value those big family-type places with their vinyl booths, generally don’t live in town; they’re out in the burbs, so that’s where you find those lovely and comfy breakfast and Sunday brunch places. In town, the demographic most likely to go out for Sunday brunch is a young crowd, kids who live with a lot of roommates or in small, cramped apartments, who have neither the space nor the cooking skill to whip up a nice home-style Sunday brunch at home, and are likely suffering through a five-alarm hangover and drug let-down after Saturday night carousing in a purgatorial dance club.
I’ve noticed that young people are generally not accorded the same levels of courtesy and service given to us middle-aged and older folk. Establishments that cater to a younger crowd are often characterized by casual rudeness, partially due to indifference at the managerial level but also due to the employees themselves having little or no pride in their work. And why should they? Slinging hash in a greasy breakfast joint habituated by Valencia Street grundgemädchens and gothmeisters is nothing but a job; it pays the rent and buys the meth. The youngsters who frequent the place are accustomed to being treated like cattle—many of them barely out of college with its ID bracelets, town-sized lecture halls, dorm dining commons and ratty local hamburger joints. They’re not going to gripe all that much, and even if they do, they don’t have the connections or clout to make any of it stick. But pull that crap on an affluent, middle-aged clientele and you’ll be slinging attitude to an empty house before long.
Would it be possible for San Francisco to acquire a culture of civilized brunches? Yes, but the same forces that have made SF a great dinner-time restaurant city have to kick in with regards to brunch and breakfast places: competition and standards. Right now there isn’t much of either. If customers vote with their feet, instead of flocking to some mediocre dive just because it’s the only one open in a ten-block radius, the situation will start to change. As long as that Valencia Street greasery is packing them in on Sundays, despite the lousy food and reprehensible service, there is no impetus to change.
But a Catch-22 situation arises. Brunch restaurants are mostly grunge- and 20-something-oriented because that’s the primary clientele. But because so many brunch places are like that, middle-aged folks such as myself avoid them. Stalemate.
Still, nothing is impossible. The Union Square Macy’s provides, to me, a dandy lesson in the advantages of competition. For quite some time Macy’s was a temple of indifference, an entire city-block retail establishment devoted to the exploration of employee aloofness, rudeness, and attitude. And then Nordstrom opened a fine new store just down the street. Nordstrom with its emphasis on fine service and courtesy, its generous return policies, its gracious welcoming environment. The Macy’s management saw the handwriting on the wall, and Macy’s underwent an astonishing change in a very short time. The snippy queens vanished along with the harried unseeing floor clerks. The store acquired friendly clerks, helpful salespeople, and a vastly improved overall atmosphere. Nowadays shopping in the men’s store at Macy’s can be a real pleasure, even when the joint is jumping. I would have abandoned Macy’s forever once the Nordstrom opened, but as it happened, both get my business.