Cross the Bridges and You Can Actually Have a Decent Brunch

Brunch seems like such a good idea: a leisurely weekend meal without constraints, where you eat all you want of breakfast and lunch, fattening up for a lazy afternoon, confident you're too hungover for excessive coffee to give you the shakes. Maybe outside, watching people go by on the sidewalk, letting the summer sun wake you up as you taste innovative takes on old classics: apple crepes, perhaps, or a new huevos rancheros with green chili sauce replacing the boring old salsa.

It's tempting. And it's both a huge business and a New York cultural institution, especially for the young and wealthy. It's what you do on the weekends. And it's kind of a tyranny.

One Saturday last June, I woke up and realized it was my 23rd birthday. I was living at my mother's house, on the Upper West Side, and not doing much of anything. It was my birthday, and I was determined to celebrate. I rounded up three people and made them take me out to brunch at Avenue, one of those quite decent Columbus Ave. restaurants that cater to the new, young affluence in that part of town. I had some sort of very flat, eggy apple pancake that had confectioner's sugar and honey drizzled over it. One friend had some little-neck clams on the halfshell. We talked some. There were pauses. It was very hot.

I believe it was the last time I had brunch in Manhattan. Now I like to wake up early on weekends, no matter how late I've been out the previous evening, and go to a diner and have breakfast: french toast, coffee, orange juice; $2.50, no lingering.

Every weekend, on 2nd Ave., on the Upper West Side, in Greenwich Village, in Chelsea, in the East Village, the young things sit at tables on the sidewalk and pay too much for too little. At Tartine, on W. 11th St., they line up in the street, carrying the fat Sunday Times, and wait to be seated at small tables for two or four, never an odd number, and touch elbows with the people behind them. They praise the restaurant's specialties and dissect their weekends. They sweat, and they don't feel very good. Why are they here? Is brunch universally appealing, or is it culturally mandated?

Brunch food is not very good. A meal that attempts to be both breakfast and lunch can only fail to be either. There's no attempt made to make the meal cohere. Instead what we get are jumbled attempts to make a syncretic meal. Have some clams with your pancakes. I'll take orange juice, coffee and a mimosa, simultaneously. Each restaurant one visits has a different take on the same repertoire of dishes. Even more than their dinner menus, brunch menus from 100 New York restaurants are essentially interchangeable, differing only in what fruit goes in the pancake, and what adjective is chosen to prove that the french toast is not actually made with plain bread, but some sort of bread variant, be it brioche or pain artisanal. There is little incentive to make a restaurant's brunch distinct from those of other restaurants, because people come anyway. It can't be a moneymaker, because little alcohol is served, and the alcohol that is served is generally given away free in the form of your cloying bloody mary or watery mimosa.

But we don't notice that brunch is bad because, and here's the secret, we've just woken up, we're hungover, we never got around to eating dinner last night and goddamn it we're going to fucking kill someone if the food doesn't come in the next two minutes. We're hungry, and we want to cram as much food as possible in our craws before we notice that one more bite will make us puke. And that's the story of brunch.

Which is fine. But I don't see why it should be hailed as a satisfying and pleasant institution, a necessity turned into a ritual.

But now I've just had brunch at two restaurants, one in Brooklyn and one in Queens, and it changed my attitude. I realized that it's not such a bad thing?that in fact I just need to stay out of Manhattan on the weekends.

Chez Oskar, on the corner of Adelphi and DeKalb, in Fort Greene, has been for a couple years the centerpiece of the new restaurant row that has sprung up on DeKalb. There are now a half-dozen upscale restaurants within a couple blocks, including the South African Madiba, and Liquors, which serves New American food out of an old liquor store, but Chez Oskar is probably the best, and certainly the most reliable. I've been going there for dinner whenever anyone will take me, and the Mediterranean take on classic French food works well. It's an attractive space, and it would probably be packed in Manhattan, but it's not in Manhattan. It's in Fort Greene, sandwiched between two playgrounds whose primary concern on weekends is the business of basketball. Summer is the season of youth tournaments, and I've been watching good basketball here, 5-foot-tall 11-year-olds you believe will eventually play in the NBA. Unfortunately, they believe it, too.

So you can watch one of the playgrounds from your outside table at Chez Oskar, in the shade provided by the Lillet umbrella, and you can spread out and stretch your legs, because only about a third of the tables are taken. And it's a warm morning, but not uncomfortable, and across the street the insides of another brownstone are being gutted to restore original moldings; the sounds of construction and demolition are constant in the neighborhood these days. And yes, the neighborhood's getting richer, and the whites are invading, but on a Saturday morning on DeKalb everyone seems pretty happy as the white homesteaders walk by with babies in strollers and the black kids ride by, two on one small bike with a tournament trophy balanced on the handlebars, and I think that if this is gentrification, well, then, I'll have another round, please. I find myself whistling along happily to the scatological and bland hiphop booming out from an SUV parked by the courts.

Chez Oskar is sufficiently French that the maitre d' in the houndstooth almost-chef's pants and the moussed hair asks me what I'm writing when he brings out the bread. And it's good bread, too, not that it's unique to Chez Oskar. It's this artisanal bread that's been popping up at, seemingly, most good restaurants these days. Though it's a boule-type bread, I don't think it's French. The crust is too dark, and the inside is a little sweet and oily. It might turn out to be one of those things Americans invent and then credit to the French. Whatever the case, it's good. I hope it stays.

So they do good food here, but brunch really can't be judged by food. Everything I had was good; nothing I had was distinct from other good French places, except the garlicky potatoes that accompanied and outshone the steak and eggs. Chez Oskar suffers from the same over-effusive menu traits as many other restaurants of its ilk, and it makes me long for the pretentious days when menus at French restaurants would be wholly in French, not this awkward amalgam of descriptives. I had some french toast, and I'm sure "cinnamon toasted brioche" sounds smoother in French, except for the brioche part, which presumably sounds the same. But it's good french toast, large and light, if unsurprising. It came with a fine fruit salad, the highlight of which was thin slices of rough-cut, sweet mango with the skin left on. They were coarse as they slid over the tongue, and you could ruminate over the small flecks of skin.

I had a beer at the bar after my meal (one great reason to visit Chez Oskar is that they serve Leffe on tap, the wonderful, sweet Belgian beer hard to find in New York) and stared at the mural on the back wall, reflected by the large mirror behind the bar. It's an interesting painting, technically proficient, an Afrocentric Toulouse-Lautrec envisioning of a wild night at a cafe in the 1920s. It stares down at a mixed crowd of couples with babies and women with African clothes and political dreds, all eating this good food unhurriedly.

?

Sunday morning was gray, and I was in Rockaway Park, Queens, sitting at a table on the dock at the Wharf, on Beach 116th St., staring out over Jamaica Bay to the fog-obscured shores of Brooklyn as an astonishingly ectomorphic waitress took our order. The Wharf is one of those amazing restaurants so firmly rooted in a sense of place that it seems odd that you can take the subway there. New York restaurants feel so arbitrarily located, but it seems natural that, since there's a bay and a dock, and a sunset or a sunrise to watch, there's a restaurant called the Wharf, serving fried food and seafood, and, of course, brunch specials from 11 to 3 on weekends.

The seafood is excellent; the breakfast-style offerings are less good, led by a Bisquick-influenced set of pancakes and a bland but filling eggs Benedict. They make an effort to put on brunch, with complimentary mimosas, screwdrivers and bloodies, but it's not your best bet.

You're at the beach, so order some clams on the halfshell, or the fish and chips, or the shrimp. They're all surprisingly great, satisfying and tasty. And treat yourself to a bottle of Bud, or maybe Coors Light. If it's a sunny day, you'll have constant boat traffic in the bay, with jet-skiers and Boston Whalers pulling up, docking and having a few beers before heading back on the water. The Irish predominate, and it's a local scene, but you're more than welcome to join. You'll see the skyline of Manhattan, and the Verrazano Bridge, and probably the best sunset in New York.

But on Sunday the fog had settled in, and we were practically the only ones sitting outside at the plastic tables on the gray wood deck. So we drank coffee and looked at the flat water and talked about how nice it was to eat brunch on a dock instead of a sidewalk.

Chez Oskar, 211 DeKalb Ave. (Adelphi St.), Brooklyn, 718-852-6250.

The Wharf, 416 Beach 116th St. (Beach Channel Dr.), Far Rockaway, 718-474-8807.