Circa 5 years ago, we saw the sudden rise in popularity of the best meal of the day: brunch. There would be the hangover brunches with friends where you debrief about your previous catastrophic night and share your stories of hangxiety. Or there’s the more sophisticated brunches as a catch up with friends or family over picture perfect avocado toast or pancakes, which would make anyone salivate on first look. However, recently its been taken one step further and the dreaded bottomless brunch has taken over. This involves all the best parts of brunch i.e. the food, and then typically an unlimited amount of alcohol in a certain amount of time at a fixed price. Anyone who has experienced a bottomless brunch will know the carnage it leads to, being black out at 1pm and having a hangover by 5pm. So that leads to the question, are bottomless brunches overrated?
Recently, all over Tik Tok we have seen countless videos of bottomless brunches going wrong with people being black out at 11am after one too many mimosas, which does leave us thinking, is this really an enjoyable experience? Personally, I’ve experienced a bottomless brunch once and that was enough to last me a lifetime. I took part in the turtle bay bottomless brunch which consists of 2 hours of unlimited cocktails for £31.50. From memory I think we each got through 8 cocktails, that are usually worth £9.60 each, in that time and also got a burger and fries meal. I have to say definitely worth the money if you are wanting to get drunk in the middle of the day. However, from this experience, I would never do it again, or at least not go so overboard. We tried to get through as many cocktails as possible, and although we succeeded, there was absolutely no need for us to have drunk so much. It led to one of my friends throwing up whole chicken pieces at the train station on our way home, which was hilarious at the time, but in hindsight was probably quite annoying to the rest of the public and not very enjoyable for my friend. After we sobered up, I had a stomach ache until the next day which I could not seem to get rid of at all. We were all so severely hungover we didn’t move from bed for the rest of the day and just watched rom coms on repeat. So overall, my personal opinion of bottomless brunch was, it was fun at the time, you get your moneys worth but the aftermath did not feel worth it. Consuming that much alcohol in that time is never healthy for anyone. I could have happily had as much fun only eating, I even probably would have enjoyed my meal more. Not drinking definitely would have led me to have a more enjoyable second half of the day. So yes, bottomless brunches are very overrated but the carnage is funny to look back on the talk about with friends so I would recommend trying it at least once, but be warned even though the brunch in the restaurant may only last a couple of hours, in reality a whole day will need to be dedicated to recovery.
“Fruit Cocktails” by Kirti Poddar is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.