IN RECENT years, brunch in Cebu has become a whole other category of its own. It has certainly come a long way from simply stacked pancakes to avocado-on-toast and bottomless Bloody Marys and mimosas.
Breaking the mold when it comes to brunch staples is SunStar Cebu’s Best New Restaurant for 2017, Weekend Kitchen and Taproom. It may be most known for its Fat Bastard, but now it’s introducing a fairly broad brunch menu that goes beyond the much-eulogized eggs Benedict and is sure to impress not just the poached egg-eating lot.
“We didn’t want to serve the typical pancake and waffle dishes. We try to be creative with all our dishes and the brunch items exude that. We create everything from scratch and combine elements that you don’t normally see but make a lot of sense in flavor and texture. A good example would be our honey-butter French toast topped with candied walnuts and bananas and some strawberry cream cheese, and our smoothie bowl with the usual granola and fruits, made more fun by the addition of homemade yogurt and three-berry popsicle,” explained Jan Rodriguez, Weekend’s chief executive officer and executive chef.
Other items to try are Everyday is the Weekend, a plateful of homemade breakfast sausage patties, strips of bacon, peperonata, mushrooms, fried eggs and toast; foie gras scrambled eggs, in which the foie gras is pan-seared before it goes on top of the silky scrambled eggs on toast, with a side salad; its house-cured salmon, using beets and juniper berries, served on toast smeared with scallion cream cheese, cucumbers and shallots; mushroom toast, a marriage between shiitake mushrooms with Gruyere and scrambled eggs on toast; and the country-style fried chicken bathed in honey-butter, drizzled with truffled honey and served with the honey-butter French toast and greens tossed with lemon vinaigrette.
To complete the experience, go for one of the particularly punchy brunch cocktails. Choose among boozy blends such as the Aperol Spritz, Oaxacan Sunrise, Rummin’ Man, Sangria and of course, the Bloody Mary, Weekend’s version of which has Agave tequila, tomato juice, Ancho Reyes liqueur, celery bitters, olives and homemade Tajin. If that’s not enough, there’s a well-curated bar of quality spirits and over 20 other cocktails on the menu.
A first-rate find not just for the ‘gram, Weekend’s brunch offerings are available from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. daily. Trust us, they will leave you walking with a bouncier spring in your step.