The Travel Critic

Brunch was made for Bank Holidays. That delicious moment in life when you are actively encouraged to surrender to inertia. It’s a meal designed for people who have nowhere better to be, no deadlines, no emails pinging, no reason at all to look at the time. It’s a rare invitation to just sit down, shut up, and eat.

Or at least, it was. Then came the horror that is “bottomless brunch”. A marketing invention that should have been shot at birth. In the last few years, the word “bottomless” has crept into the lexicon, curled up like a drunk cat next to “brunch”, and utterly defiled it. Now, “brunch” means 40 women called Jess and Chloe hammering mimosas until they’re slurring Beyoncé lyrics while staggering on sticky tabletops, weeping into the last shreds of their dignity by 5.30pm.

Meanwhile, the places that don’t offer bottomless brunch have had an existential crisis and simply shoved a limp breakfast menu next to a lunch one, like a pub that’s trying to pretend it’s a bistro. No one knows what anything means anymore. Least of all me.

Enter The Metropolitan. Praise be.

Tucked discreetly between the ludicrously expensive sofa shops of Whiteladies Road — the kind of places that charge £6,000 for something that looks like a giant dog bed — The Metropolitan has restored not only my faith in brunch, but also in humanity.

The vibe inside is stylish but grown-up: none of that Shoreditch nonsense where every chair is a different shape and the tables are either too low or too high and the coffee comes in an ironic jam jar. No, here things match. Here things make sense. Here, you can sit without risking lumbar collapse.

The menu is what brunch should be: simple, clever, gently indulgent. Yes, the classics are present and correct — Eggs Benedict, Royal, Florentine — but then they go and throw in salt cod fritters (yes please), plump little scallops swimming in garlic butter (oh yes), and a Monte Cristo sandwich so filthy it ought to be illegal before midday.

Reader, my fancy was tickled pink.

The service is friendly without being matey, efficient without the “Have you dined with us before?” corporate creepiness. Everything — and I mean everything — was executed with precision.

My only complaint? My tragic human stomach, cursed with its mortal limitations. I couldn’t eat everything on the menu in one sitting. But I’ll be back, with the grim determination of a man who knows he has unfinished business.

Loved it. Loved it all.

If you want brunch, real brunch — grown-up, relaxed, gorgeous — go to The Metropolitan. And leave the “bottomless” brigade to their table-dancing tears elsewhere.