Brunch is polarizing. On one hand, it’s the quintessential comfort food. All about ritual and habit (and getting the same egg-centric menu where ever you go), it’s a great hangover cure and the perfect cover for day drinking. But that also means it’s often unimaginative and boring. Who really needs another from-concentrate juice mimosa?
Besides, it’s rather uneconomical (30 bucks for eggs and toast!): You pay through your nose (and often endure long waits) for the privilege for the weekend meal. It’s hard not to feel like a schmuck when going out to brunch.
Yet, a goldmine for restaurateurs and so crowd pleasing you can get even the most unadventurous of your friends to eat it with no complaints; brunch has become a weekend staple for more folks than would like admit. Once the domain of magnetic-manicured young ladies, it seems to have taken off even at non-traditional hangouts.
Peranakan restaurant Violet Oon’s Kitchen has just rolled out a new weekend brunch (9:30am to 3pm), with items like corn beef hash ($17)—spiked with a good dose of chilli—and French toast with gula melaka banana sauce ($15). All served up in generous portions, the dishes are big enough to tide you through dinner, especially washed down drinks like their lychee mint smoothie.
Then, there’s Latin spot SUR, where you can order all sorts of fun things—think arepas stuffed with black beans and white cheese ($14) and poached eggs with pork belly ($21)—from their new brunch selection, available 11am-3pm on Sunday.
The brunch bug has hit food and wine bar okb too. They’ve just started serving dishes such as Dinosaur Eggs ($15.90), a scotch egg on sweet potato mash, and Breakfast in a Cup ($6.90), a crumbly pastry shell filled with a whole egg and bacon, on Saturdays from 11am-2:30pm.
It just might be enough to get us off the fence about brunch.
