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The beauty of brunch
By CHRIS SHERMAN
© St. Petersburg Times, published April 12, 2001
Brunch, how do we love thee?
I cannot count the ways, even with five trips through the buffet line. Did you see all that shrimp?
Actually, it's not all gluttony. One reason is that we don't eat enough hot breakfasts even though we secretly love them. The sweet warmth of pancakes and waffles or the eggs we say we don't eat anymore are so nurturing that comfort-starved modern Americans now seek out breakfast foods for dinner.
Sunday mornings seem the easiest point in too-busy weeks to take time for such a meal, whether we have memories of cappuccino and the Sunday paper, a weekend deliciously lost in New Orleans or Sunday dinner after church with all the cousins.
Since we don't have a decent morning meal often, we eat later and make up for lost time with brunch, a meal bigger than breakfast or lunch, more like an early party.
There are two ways to love brunch: the endless buffet or the made-to-order meal.
The first is an array so vast it covers dinner, too (brunner, perhaps?). It's no longer just roast beef on the carving station and platters of salmon and shrimp, but a smorgasbord of American ethnic dishes, pasta Alfredo, lamb and tabouleh, roast pork and black beans, Thai chicken and sushi. That's on top of lox and bagels, pancakes, waffles, eggs, fruits, cheeses and pastries by the truckload.
While brunch can be just an all-you-can-eat pigout at the steam-table, it also can be luxury on a Titanic scale.
Many chefs provide elaborate samples of garde-manger, cold food in beautifully sculpted compositions, fine pastries and exotic hot foods, a chance for the public to attend lavish private parties (potential catering customers often scout brunches).
At the Renaissance Vinoy Resort in St. Petersburg, the most expensive brunch in the area, chefs fill crepes with chicken and pistachios and carve rouladens of veal and crawfish, while diners open domes of chafing dishes to find scallops in black truffle oil and saffron bowties with rock shrimp and rapini.
To many, the diversity of buffets grand and mediocre will not compensate for standing in line (as many times as you want), hunting for the best stuff and winding up with a plate full of tiny, conflicting tastes: a good Swedish meatball, yellow tomatoes and fresh mozzarella, and waffles with gummy bears.
When food is wonderful, we purists would rather sit down to more of it. Or have one proper omelet with a croissant or maybe steak and eggs with hash browns and biscuits brought to the table.
Many chefs and cooks love brunch for reasons of their own. They love grand presentation and have profound respect for egg dishes.
"When you're going to do a brunch, you have to go all out," says Eric Neri, the executive chef who presides over the buffet at the Don CeSar Beach Resort and Spa in St. Pete Beach. "That's the satisfaction of it."
At a neighborhood spot like Harvey's 4th Street Grill, kitchen manager Rob Brusini bursts with pride about the made-to-order brunch. "It's the biggest day of the week," Brusini says. "There are people here waiting when we open the door and people hungry for brunch at 2:30 when we stop," so he handles grilling and sauteeing himself and fills other slots with his best crew.
That's another reason brunch or breakfast out is good almost anywhere: Someone else cooks it.
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