An investigation into the avocado, the flat white, and the strange social contract that makes us queue for breakfast we could make at home

I report for Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat, and in the course of my duties I recently paid fourteen pounds for two eggs on toast, and I have been thinking about it ever since, the way one thinks about a minor crime one has both committed and been the victim of.

The eggs were, I will concede, very good eggs. They sat upon sourdough that had clearly been to finishing school, anointed with something the menu called whipped feta and a scattering of what I can only describe as artisanal weeds. There was a flat white alongside, served in a cup so heavy it could be used as a weapon, by a young man with a moustache from another century. It was all extremely lovely. It was also two eggs on toast, and it cost fourteen pounds.

The Queue As Lifestyle

To obtain these eggs I had queued. This is the first thing one must understand about North London brunch: the queue is not a flaw in the experience but the experience itself. We queue, on a Sunday morning, in the cold, outside a cafe with an ironic name, for the privilege of eating food we could make at home for the price of, roughly, the eggs. And we do this willingly, even competitively, eyeing the queue at the rival cafe across the road to confirm that ours is longer and therefore superior.

I have analysed this behaviour at length, partly for my column and partly out of genuine bewilderment, and I have concluded that the brunch is not really about the food. The food is the pretext. The brunch is about belonging, about performing a certain kind of North London life, about being seen to be the sort of person who queues for whipped feta on a Sunday. The eggs are merely the ticket of admission.

The Avocado And Other Crimes

And then there is the avocado, the great signifier of our age, smashed upon toast and held responsible, by a certain genre of newspaper columnist, for the inability of my generation to buy property. The maths of this has been thoroughly debunked by actual economists, whose work I have cited with some relish, since it turns out that even a lifetime of forsaken avocados would not close the gap between a North London salary and a North London deposit. But the myth persists, because it is comforting to the old to believe the young are merely feckless rather than priced out.

The serious thread here, as ever, is economic. The brunch boom is a symptom of a generation that cannot afford the big things, the house, the security, the future, and so spends on the small things, the eggs, the flat white, the experience, because the small luxuries are the only ones within reach. It is not fecklessness. It is what is left when the larger doors are closed, and the avocado is less a cause of our predicament than a consolation for it.

I will, of course, go again. Next Sunday, probably, to a different cafe with a different ironic name, where I will queue in the cold for different eggs at a similarly absurd price, and I will enjoy it, and I will resent enjoying it, and I will write about it, and the whole strange social contract of North London brunch will roll on, fourteen pounds at a time, one beautifully photographed plate after another.

The cafes themselves are a study in a particular aesthetic, the exposed brick, the filament bulbs, the reclaimed-wood tables, the plants, the obligatory plants, hanging from every available surface as though the room were slowly being reclaimed by an apologetic jungle. The staff are uniformly young, beautiful, and possessed of facial hair or tattoos or both, and they describe the coffee in the reverent tones a sommelier might reserve for a serious wine.

The menus are written in a dialect all their own, the eggs not fried but oozing, the bread not toasted but charred, the coffee bearing notes of stone fruit and, on one alarming occasion, tobacco. Everything is sourced, everything is small-batch, everything has a provenance more thoroughly documented than my own family tree. It is, I have come to understand, a kind of theatre, and we the diners are both audience and cast.

The photography is mandatory. No plate may be eaten until it has been photographed, the diners rising slightly from their seats to capture the overhead shot, the light adjusted, the angle considered, the image dispatched to the wider world as evidence of a life being lived correctly. The food, by the time it is actually eaten, has gone cold, but this is a price we pay gladly, for the meal was never really for eating; it was for documenting.

I confess I do it too. I photograph my fourteen-pound eggs, I adjust the light, I dispatch the evidence, and I feel, briefly, the small glow of having performed the ritual correctly. And then I eat the cold eggs and feel slightly foolish, as one does, and resolve to do better, and fail, and return the following Sunday to do it all again. The brunch has me, as it has all of us, and I have stopped pretending otherwise.

More in this vein at The Daily Mash.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/