Pancakes, meet pandan. Asian American restaurants add their own spin to the weekend brunch
LOS GATOS, Calif. (AP) — With a DJ spinning and patrons lounging in black-and-gold barrel chairs, Breaking Dawn has clubbing vibes. But this isn’t a club. It’s weekend brunch at this restaurant nestled in a Bay Area suburb.
The stars of the show are the entrees served with Asian flair and names playing on popular phrases.
There’s “Resting Brunch Face,” a green pandan waffle with fried chicken and Vietnamese iced coffee syrup. Also popular is “FO Sizzle,” beef with sunnyside-up egg, roasted tomato and a baguette — inspired by the Vietnamese dish known as shaking beef or bò lúc lắc.
The menu unites Asian and American taste buds. Owner Liz Truong designed it based on her daughter’s favorite foods.
“I think food creates memories, food creates conversations,” said Truong, keeping watch over the bopping dining room and outdoor patio “So, I created a place where I took the most important foods in different cultures and that’s why it’s called fusion.”
While the term “Asian brunch” might initially evoke images of traditional meals like Chinese dim sum, now it often means restaurants that offer Asian takes on American brunch.
Breaking Dawn was one of two places that opened in the San Francisco Bay Area last spring emphasizing brunch. Although the region is already rich in Asian American-owned places serving comfort food, both eateries have lines out the door.
Asian American restaurants in other cities have also found that sweet and savory spot between breakfast and lunch. But putting an “Asian” spin on it isn’t just adding something on the side. It’s often a complex balancing act of flavors.
Nattacha “Phin” Lerspreuk and her husband, Thanasit “Toto” Nanthasitsira, own the other new restaurant, Taste and Glory in San Mateo. They were inspired by visits back home to Thailand. There, some newer restaurants have embraced brunch with items like Thai tea French toast, she says.
Among top-selling entrees at Taste and Glory is a tom yum scramble. Tom yum soup, made with lemongrass, galangal, and kaffir lime leaves, is the basis for a sauce in a croissant sandwich of scrambled eggs, Dungeness crab, tomatoes, mushrooms, onion and Swiss cheese. It’s fine with Lerspreuk if some people frown at her ingredient mash-ups.
“I just want to do something new and something different,” she said.
Chef Francis Ang, of San Francisco’s Abacá, has been at the brunch game since opening the city’s first Filipino fine-dining establishment in 2021. His brunch offerings include an appetizer tower with buttered pandesal (a classic Filipino roll), lumpia (spring rolls), oysters and wagyu beef salad. “We look at seasonality, we look at what people would like. And then we look at Filipino American influence too,” he says.
Jessica Nguyen, 28, who was finishing brunch at Breaking Dawn, says she’ll almost always choose Asian brunch over regular eggs or waffles. She is willing to overlook that it may be more expensive because of both food and ambience.
“When I try Asian brunch ‘fusion’ spots that are starting to become popular now, I get excited about seeing how they make the food — how they combine the food,” said Nguyen.
A mid-morning meal is customary in a lot of Asian cultures, says Martin Manalansan, co-editor of the book “Eating Asian America.” For example, dim sum — a meal of small plates with delicacies like pork buns and shrimp dumplings — is typically consumed at brunch time in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.
But Asian American chefs are catering to a contemporary dining scene that loves the ritual of decadent breakfast food with a cocktail thrown in. They are “reappropriating or reconfiguring food” on their terms, he adds.
“Brunch is so mainstream. Especially in urban areas I think that has become kind of a norm,” Manalansan says. “It’s not just the food itself, but really expanding ideas of what is good and appropriate at a certain time and a certain meal.”
There’s also a long history of derision of Asian foods, from stereotypes of Chinatown restaurants in the 1800s to smelly-lunchbox cafeteria taunts a century later. Within the last few decades, Asian and Asian American cuisine has become more popular through media and savvy foodies.
Eric Silverstein, founder of The Peached Tortilla restaurants in Austin, Texas, added a brunch menu a few months into the 2014 opening of his first location. The dishes reflect the half-Chinese Silverstein’s childhood spent in Tokyo and then Atlanta. The bill of fare ranges from steak marinated in gochujang, sake and fish sauce served with eggs over rice, to chicken katsu curry with a fried egg.
One of his Asian friends used to assure people the food was “a great gateway drug” to trying Asian flavors. A decade later, Silverstein still hears from non-Asian patrons who had never had certain ingredients before.
“You want to be creative but, at the end of the day we’re also trying to run a business,” Silverstein says. “You don’t want to go too crazy and then alienate your customer base either.”
He cautions restaurant owners to do more than just brunch if possible.
Silverstein’s restaurants also open for dinner. And Truong’s Breaking Dawn is part of a “dual concept restaurant”; the space transforms into First Born restaurant at night with a different menu and head chef.
She doesn’t see other restaurants with Asian brunch as rivals. In fact, Truong has had other restaurant proprietors come ask her questions and tour the back of house.
“It’s all about leaving a legacy. It’s all about sharing my experience,” she says. “I think if they’re good and they’re busting their butt and they’re working, they deserve support as well.”