The Bad Boys - and Girls - of Brunch

With all due respect to Tony Bourdain, I love working brunch. Tony's hollandaise horror story is legendary now and he generally condemns the very idea of brunch - the scorn of all cooks is what he essentially says. And that's how I felt too. I hated working brunch when I was a kid at my family's restaurant - even though it was a fairly easy Chinese-American buffet. Fried rice, egg rolls, egg foo young, chop suey - that kind of thing. It was actually really good - with the old-school peanut butter and chicken skin egg rolls - but I just hated working Sundays. But I really love working our brunch at Les Ambassadeurs. Not only do I like the food - and get to discretely eat a fair amount of it as we work - but it's just such a joy after doing gastronomic food all week. With our regular menu, just the first table of two can mean an extraordinary amount of intensely detailed, heart-stopping, head-pounding work. But brunch - even though we have almost twice as many covers - serving up to 80 - is so much fun. It's like having a corner cafe with a few of your best friends in the kitchen - who happen to be some of the best cooks in the world. Our brunch is billed as a World Brunch - with a choice of mains inspired by various countries - done with a French haute cuisine accent. You start brunch with an amuse bouche of an ouef cocotte - or a soft-cooked egg, steam baked in a heavy glass terrine jar - with a bit of spinach, tomato and garlic confit - and a trompette de la mort/black chantrelle cream sauce. It's plated with a tiny halved baguette toasted then rubbed with garlic and a teeny mesclun salad dressed with truffle vinaigrette. The current choice of mains are an Americaine - kind of a cross between a Caesar salad and a classic dish called a lobster Americaine; the Parisienne - chicken that's grilled then dipped in Dijon mustard and then in a mixed herb/breadcrumb mixture and finally finished to a golden crust under the salamander; the Italienne - a seasonally changing risotto - currently a morel risotto finished with more morels and a julienne of wild garlic leaves; and a Norvigienne - a rich, buttery potato pancake topped with thick slices of mi-cuit salmon and dressed with a quenelle of dill cream. There's also all you can eat thinly sliced Spanish jamon and smoked salmon. I haven't seen all there is on the sweet side, but I have had some of the fluffy citrus pancakes. And then there are the Christine Ferber jams. She's the Coco Chanel of the jam world. And at our brunch we have dozens of her flavours and you get your pick. And at the end of service today I packed up 18 empty jars. I plan on making some of my own Parisian small-batch preserves - so my family can taste some of the beautiful fruit I have here. Starting with the Gariguette spring strawberries, and then the summer yellow mirabells plums, and figs in the fall. But first I have to unpack my pots. And as I walked out with those 18 jars, Andrea said, "Uh - girl - I think I know why you have 10 boxes marked 'Kitchen' too."