Here’s a fun article on the evolution of brunch.
Quotes:
“[T]here’s an argument that [Sunday brunch] owes a great deal to American Jewry. Brunch, Gary Greengrass acknowledges, was a kind of Jewish alternative to church. Jewish families, with nothing much to do on Sunday mornings, would take a long, leisurely meal, with traditional foods like bagels, lox, and blintzes. Occasionally, they would take that meal out.”
“As far as I can tell, the essential quality of an Upper West Side brunch seems to consist of milling in a large group outside of a restaurant for over an hour.”
“Brunch often has a distinctly post-coital vibe. Either one is brunching with one’s romantic partner from the previous evening, in which case a louche afterglow hangs in the air, or one is brunching with friends, in which case one is wondering aloud why a louche afterglow isn’t hanging in the air.”
I don’t know if brunch has a “post-coital vibe” – it sounds a bit too chick-lit to be true – but it’s fun to think about anyway.
Brunch is not an invention of New Yorkers in the 1980s. The word has been used as far back as the 19th century:
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=brunch
We certainly used the word when I was growing up in the West in the 1970s. It connoted a particularly boozy late breakfast — late enough that laws proscribing the sale of alcohol before noon on Sunday could be satisfied. I think that even in New York, it’s popularity has a great deal to do with the Mimosas or Bloody Marys that are served.
My grandparents, who lived like it was the 1950s many decades after that time, were devotees of the brunch their whole adult lives. And also, the happy hour.
Yes. Oh, yes. Brunch totally has a post-coital vibe. That quote was dead on.