Late last October, Mazen Mustafa, the executive chef at Paul Liebrandt’s the Elm in Williamsburg, did something he never thought he’d do: He started serving brunch.
Mustafa, 35, has interned at a three-Michelin-star restaurant in the French countryside. He spent two years as the chef de cuisine at the late Corton in Tribeca, working alongside Liebrandt, serving artful, elaborately plated seven-course dinners for $145. But his impressive résumé never included working at a restaurant that serves brunch — until now.
Mustafa is one of a number of highly skilled chefs at top NYC restaurants suddenly getting into the brunch game after avoiding it for years. These chefs are putting new spins on brunch basics, challenging longtime prejudices against the midday meal.
“Most [diners] don’t give brunch its fair share,” says Mustafa. Now, “more high-end technical chefs [are] stepping in to develop a new brunch culture . . . We’ve all done dinner for many years, now brunch is the next creative platform.”
For certain food lovers — both chefs and diners — brunch has long been the subject of derision, thought of as nothing more than overpriced eggs for mimosa-swilling suckers. The Internet abounds with screeds about hating brunch, and one’s feelings about it are treated as a serious political opinion capable of making and breaking friendships.
In his 2000 memoir, “Kitchen Confidential,” Anthony Bourdain famously slammed brunch as “a dumping ground for the odd bits leftover from Friday and Saturday nights.” He singled out classic brunch ingredients as danger zones: “Bacteria love hollandaise,” he wrote. “And nobody I know has ever made hollandaise to order.”
Mustafa, however, is making the hollandaise to order for his lobster Benedict. The lobster is also cooked à la minute, and a three-egg omelet features hen of the woods mushrooms and local cheese. Plus, Mustafa says “it’s the same cooks at dinner as with brunch.”
Some chefs admit that starting to serve brunch was not an initially popular decision.
“People here at the restaurant were a little nervous, like, ‘Oh God, we’re going to do brunch,’ ” says Matthew Rudofker, 26, the executive chef at David Chang’s Momofuku Ssäm Bar, where he launched brunch earlier this year with dishes including smoked salmon buns. It was a first for the legendary 8-year-old downtown restaurant.
“People think of overcooked eggs, really bad coffee, premixed Bloody Marys,” Rudofker adds. But he was confident he could do a fresh take on brunch, and Chang trusted him.
Down the street from Momofuku Ssäm, at Wylie Dufresne’s Alder, executive chef Jon Bignelli, 36, also wanted to put his own creative spin on brunch, a meal he actually likes.
“I love brunch when it’s done right,” enthuses Bignelli, whose original brunch menu includes bacon, egg and cheese gyoza and inventive cocktails. The problem, he says, is “people slop stuff together, and you just see the same stuff over and over and over again.”
But the impetus behind these new brunch menus isn’t just creativity.
“You have to cater to your customer,” says Danny Amend, 33, the executive chef at Marco’s, a high-end Italian joint in Prospect Heights that started serving brunch a couple weeks ago with dishes like tagliarini with butter and sage. There are no plans to put a burger or waffles on the menu.
For Marco Canora, 45, the executive chef and restaurateur at Hearth in the East Village, it took nine years in operation to succumb to the neighborhood’s brunch mania. He started serving the meal about a year ago, when he saw potential customers waiting for hours to get into popular nearby spots, such as Prune, which are tiny and have no reservations.
“I thought to myself, ‘We have a large dining room and we have a reservation system,’ ” he recalls.
Canora insists he puts the same focus on quality ingredients in his brunch dishes that he does in his dinner plates: “The jaded people out there think that as operators we do brunch just because we want to rape and pillage,” he says. “But the tomatoes we use are still the wonderful tomatoes we use at night.”