The Sunday Brunch

LUNCHEON OR LUNCH BUT NOT BRUNCH! advised Emily Post. It took her only ten lines to dismiss the custom as a "single-headed, double-bodied deformity 'standees' of at a lunch language" that counter but not "suggests the beauty of hospitable living." That was in the 1950 edition of Etiquette. The current edition takes a different view of brunch, calls it "a pleasant sort of informal, even casual entertaining," offers tips on how to dress and what to serve. Moving with the times, the post-Post posture simply acknowledges that going out to Sunday brunch with family or friends has become very much a part of hospitable living.

In New Orleans, for instance, there will be a brunch in honor of one or another New Orleans debutante every Sunday from now through Mardi gras. "I think people got tired of cocktail parties," says Mrs. Max M. Green, who gave a deb brunch at the New Orleans Country Club last week. In Chicago, when ever the Bears play at home, members of the Racquet Club gather for a brunch of Bloody Marys, eggs Benedict, codfish cakes and popovers, before bussing out to the football game. In San Francisco, Trader Vic's restaurant has made a tradition out of the annual brunch before the Giants' opening game.

Pub & Home. Served from noon on ward, brunch has always been a natural next step for churchgoers after the 11 a.m. service. Increasingly, even for the clergy, the scene for brunch is shifting from the home to the neighborhood pub or midtown restaurant. The brunch bunch at Manhattan's Delmonico's has increased 150% in the three years since the hotel instituted the custom. Because it is located in the middle of the Rockefeller Center office complex, Irish-style Charley O's ought logically to be deserted on Sunday; instead, as many as 230 people swarm in for brunch--and on St. Patrick's Day, the crowd included Bobby and Ethel.

For people in show business who spend their evenings working, brunch is virtually a way of life. Explains Actress Lee Remick, the blind wife in Broadway's Wait Until Dark: "It's about the only way my husband and I can entertain." So popular has brunch become that it is now being re-exported to Britain (where the word was coined at the turn of the century) as the latest U.S. fad.

Bloody Mary Soup. At home or abroad, the core of any brunch menu is egg dishes, and there is no limit to the garnishes with which they are prepared.

At the Beverly Wilshire, the favorite is poached eggs de Severski--on toast, with caviar and hollandaise sauce. In Sausalito's Alta Mira, it is eggs princess: poached eggs on a bed of creamed chicken and asparagus spears with hollandaise. Beyond eggs, there are endless local specialties. Los Angeles' Santa Ynez Inn serves mahimahi, baked fillets of dolphin topped, Polynesian-style, with shredded coconut and sliced pineapple.

At New Orleans' Brennan's, no brunch is complete without grillades and grits--peppers pounded into a veal round, then cooked in a Creole gravy. The Rainbow Room, atop Manhattan's R.C.A. Building, has taken to serving hot Bloody Mary soup, which is both tasty and the most ingenious way yet of dispensing liquor before the legal 1 p.m. Sunday starting time.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.