Brunch Bumpkins in Khakiland

Is DC not the most offensively preppy place on the eastern seaboard? Young, J-Crew-wearing New Englanders venture south in search of down home gentility. Industrious and politically concerned southern belles and beaus head north in search of the northeastern urban experience. They come together at the nations capital, the southern tip of the northeastern megalopolis. Gentification ensues--a force that is propelled by the possibility that they may too have a neighborhood where they can venture out of their young professional digs in their flip-flops on a Sunday morning, at various stages of hung-over and draped across that mop-bucket of an intern they brough home with them last night, and fill their growning bellies while drinking their last nights embarassments away. Brunch there seems a fairly homogeneous drunk-wasp affair. I may be wrong, and I digress.

Perhaps I should write from experience, however, and not second hand impression. Out here is smoggy Los Angeles, you have a pretty wide selection of brunch styles. You can eat your moring bread and porrige at some shabby chic digs in Santa Monica; go hipster watching at some intentionally greasy spoon in Los Feliz; or put on your Sunday tackies and head for a low tide $20 bagle and lox with the Lexus leasing crowd in Malibu.

In the spirit of oneupsmanship, I have settled onto dragging my wife around town to gather some material so that my inevitably petty contributions to this blog might some day communicate some real world brunch experience. I had hoped, this past Sunday, to start out with a gloating bang. I decided to start at the top: the ever swanky, reservations needed in advance, Napa Valley Grill.

Ok, lets grant the fact that in the process of writing this, I have quickly devolved into that negative, snarky mood that writing any critique puts me in. I am aware. I am also aware that the Napa Valley Grill deserves a swift kick in the rump for their grandiose claims to serve brunch. So much online advertisement on citysearch about their five star brunch is perhaps one of the more misleading claims I have fell for in a few weeks. Their stellar line-up consisted of a weak benedict, a standard omlet, and a build-it-yourself version of the standard omlet. Period. The waiter. Oh the waiter. Yet another aspiring actor. The buzz about town is that if all the illegial Mexicans were deported, the city's restuarants would cease and desist. So untrue. It is the struggling actors that keep the culinary service at its dull rhythm around here. Beautiful faces = poor servants. Ours started out all but insisting that we choose a bottle of wine. Not mention of mimosa or a bloody gal. He was visibly put off when I ordered an orange juice. For fuck sake man, I can understand the absence of pancakes from an upscale menu, but if you want to suggest a drink to go with my (low quality) benedict, the house Noir reveals an absence of sense.

Aparently I skipped some pretty important World Cup games for this brunch. Napa Valley Grill is a few long miles away from our apartment, and despite the heat, I made my wife walk with me. She caught an allegry attack shortly before we left and between my stubbornness that the pollen soaked air would be good for her, and the pitting out going on underneath our arms, the walk was the first sign of an all around set of poor choices on my part: the restuarant being only one. Thankfully, the company, a couple I had so wanted to impress with my high-scale selection of venue was sufficiently chatty so as to keep the embarassing state of my perspiring brow, as well as the overall smoke-and-mirrors quality of the "Grill".

My bacon was burned, the fruit was withered, the OJ was from the can. The wine-pusher put me off my drinking game. All in all, a disappointment swells in my chest. Thankfully I live in a city as diverse as it is polluted.

For next weekend, we will slum it. I am left to decide between the "classic" Los Angeles strip-mall dive or the fake-house looking corporate chain IHOP. There probably won't be booze, but after last Sunday, I am endorsing the brunch pre-gamer. Perhaps in the lot, out of the back of my pickup truck.