brunch with flowers and champagne
"Unlimited" is a word that is often associated with brunch. Usually it's used with the mimosa play, offering up all the sparkly orange juiced flutes one can handle as a bonus to brunchers. And, if it's a buffet brunch, the number of trips to the chafing dishes are yours to count. Scoop upon scoop of semi-dry scrambled eggs are measured by only your inner value system. This schtick is actually one of the reasons I've not been the biggest fan of brunch, because things offered in limitless quantities usually means that quality isn't at the forefront. Trumped, as it is, by volume.
So you might say that I entered as a skeptic to Baldamar's new Saturday brunch. The Champagner is a special menu brunch in which you pay $90 for all you can eat and all you can drink. Held in the Roseville restaurant's private dining room, it happens as two seatings, one at 11 a.m. and one at 1:30 p.m. This isn't something you can just choose to roll in, get a table, and order off the regular menu. It's a reservation and a two hour meal. There are a number of rules to make it work, and I truthfully thought it was going to feel like a game show: eat everything you can as fast as you can to make that $90 earn its keep! Delightfully, I was wrong.
We opted for the second seating, which started at 1:30 p.m. The room was being turned and re-set when we arrived, and we noticed a lot of people pouring out of it with full glasses and landing at the bar. When it was our turn to head in, we were greeted with glasses of bubbles and ushered to our table. For the amount of tables in the place, there were quite a few servers, and you felt their attention at the tables.
The menu for this brunch is a version of the regular Sunday brunch menu. It's far larger than I expected, with starters and entrees from sweet to savory, steaks to eggs, salads to starches. What I was expecting was: filler. There was not a massive plate of hashbrowns or tall stack of cakes as an intended foil to ordering harder, don't play me with your salad bar and endless breadsticks. Instead of one wine or one option for bubbs, there was a full list of cocktails, a nice selection of wines, and that guy walking around filling the bubbs if you wanted him to. What I'm saying is that it felt abundant, even though I was looking for the gotcha.
Here are the rules: You have only two hours for this meal. You have to be done with a course before you order the next course. Clearly, only a monster would saddle up for this and try to order everything at once, coursing is being nice to the kitchen. The idea is to order a round of plates, and then when you're done with them (and no, you are not forced to clean your plate) and want to move on to some more plates, you just let your server know. You can move from starters to entrees, or you can dip back and forth between the menu sections like we did.
brunch table
Our first round of food included smoked pork belly with bourbon soaked cherries, sea bass crudo with cucumbers and mango, and avocado toast for the three of us. We like to sample, not own plates, and this was perfect. Once we'd taken our fill of that, we ordered a few more plates and then a few more plates: pancetta carbonara made with fresh linguini, a king crab bennie with hollandaise, Brussels with Neuske's bacon and a soft egg, London broil with potato puree, French dip sliders among them. Some of the dishes hit and some didn't, but this was only their first day of The Champagner, so we gave them some leeway. We actually liked that the portions were, on the whole, a bit smaller than a traditional plate would be, because that allowed us to have our few bites, and then move on. If we really, really liked something, we could always order it again.
We watched our clocks, and instead of feeling like we were under the gun, or that they would stretch out the pacing to make it harder for us to get more plates in, we found ourselves actually just settling in. The pacing from our server was informed, attentive, and fully within our control. We tried a few cocktails after the bubbles and then once we moved to wine, he kept our glasses full and was always within reach. At some point, I stopped trying to game this brunch and just leaned back into it.
pasta and dishes on table
The management team told me that the whole intent of the Champagner Brunch was to be about luxury. Not speed, not gamification, but the opportunity to pay a set price and then relax into two hours of food that comes to you on plates from the kitchen, instead of lolling about in sterno-burned pans.
Around us, there were tables of couples, families, and one particular big round table filled with ladies. This is the way to go. I watched them pass plates, go from cocktails to wine and back again, get up and change seats with each other: It was a proper hang.
By the end of the meal, you are given a "last call" for food. I had imagined that we would be scrambling at that point to order and then scarf said dishes before being kicked out. As full as we were, the only last call dish we could manage was the brick of French Toast with bacon-bourbon maple syrup, which may have won for best dish of the day. Our server topped off our glasses and invited us to adjourn to the bar. Some of the people from the earlier seating were still there.
Do I think that $90 is worth that brunch? Absolutely. The amount of food and drink we consumed would have cost even more on the regular. The dishes were hot and made to order, offering so much more than just piles of sausage or over steamed veg. But it is a special occasion deal, in that to really make it worth it, you have to be hungry and up for sampling. Bringing a group to pass plates is a good way to win. And if you can't drive after this (AYCD) brunch, the mall and the movie theater are steps across the parking lot just waiting to help you sober up and walk off some calories.
