I was on the phone with the hostess at the Bistro on Patton, reading from my clipboard for the twelfth time that morning, when she said the exact same sentence the woman at the Corner Kitchen said: “a delicate lemon-forward hollandaise with chive.” Word for word. Same comma. I sat down on the kitchen floor next to the dog and I said, out loud, to nobody, oh my god, it’s one warehouse.
This started two weeks ago when my friend Carrie left her Mother’s Day brunch receipt from last year on my counter and the eggs benedict was twenty-four dollars. Twenty-four. For two poached eggs that, and I want to be careful here, did not taste like an egg a chicken would recognize. Carrie said she felt strange the rest of the day. Heavy. Like she’d been to a wedding she wasn’t invited to. I told her to drink lemon water and I started making calls.
I called thirty-one restaurants between Black Mountain and Weaverville. I had a script. I asked about the hollandaise, the smoked salmon, and “the garnish situation,” because the garnish situation is where they tell on themselves. Twenty-six of the thirty-one used the phrase “micro-greens with a citrus oil.” Three said “with citrus oil.” Two hung up. The hollandaise descriptions, when I lined them up in my notebook, were ninety-percent identical. The chive is always “chiffonade.” Nobody chiffonades a chive at home. Nobody.
So I called my sister-in-law Lacey, who does intake and partial bookkeeping for a regional food broker outside Charlotte and is, for our purposes, basically in logistics. Lacey told me — and I am going to quote her — “Brooke, every brunch within four hours of here is the same brunch. There’s a building. I’m not supposed to talk about the building.” I asked her what’s in the building. She said “holiday product.” I asked what holiday product is. She said “Mother’s Day, mostly. Some Easter overflow.” Then her boss came back and she had to go.
Reader, I drove to Greensboro. I packed the kids’ rice cakes and put Ember in the front because she’s the calmest in unfamiliar zip codes. The warehouse is a beige rectangle off Burnt Poplar Road with no signage and a single refrigerated truck idling in the lot at 9:14 in the morning on a Tuesday, which is not a delivery day for anybody who respects the food. I sat across the street with my windows down for forty minutes and I counted four trucks. One of them, and I cannot stress this enough, said “BRUNCH SOLUTIONS” on the side. Just that. “BRUNCH SOLUTIONS.” Like it’s a category of problem.
I posted about it in a Facebook group I belong to called “What’s Actually In Restaurant Sauces (Mama Edition)” and within an hour I had three women messaging me privately to say their husbands work in food service and yes, the hollandaise is shelf-stable, comes in a bag, gets warmed in a thermal bath, and “the chive is freeze-dried and rehydrated in the walk-in.” One of them said the citrus oil is the same citrus oil they use at the airport. The airport, you guys. We are paying twenty-four dollars to eat airport.
I am not telling you not to honor your mother. I am telling you that the woman who carried you for nine months and who, in my case, has been awake since 5:14 a.m. doing laundry that is not hers, deserves food that came from somewhere a person could point to on a map. So this year I am making brunch in my own kitchen. I am doing a soft scramble with eggs from the Lutz farm, sourdough I started Wednesday (which is not an ingredient, sourdough time is a process), a little flake salt (which is a mineral, not food), and citrus from the tree my mother-in-law mails me from Florida every April for reasons I have stopped questioning.
If you are a mother reading this on Friday morning with a sticky note on your fridge that says “reservations 11:15 Sunday,” I am asking you, gently, woman to woman, to cancel. Tell him you want a walk. Tell him you want a bath. Tell him you want him to take the children to the river for ninety minutes. Do not let a man take you to brunch this year. The hollandaise knows what it did.