Brunch Is Best With Some Surprises. Try This Edamame and Yuzu Dip.

Magazine|Brunch Is Best With Some Surprises. Try This Edamame and Yuzu Dip.

When Ravinder Bhogal was growing up in Kenya, as “Daughter No. 4” (as she wryly puts it) in a family with Punjabi roots, the avocados in her backyard were the size of coconuts. She’d crush sugar right into the flesh and spoon it out. No such luck in England, where she moved with her family at age 7 on a day of icy rain, to a dark, damp flat without central heating.

Recipe: Avocado, Edamame and Yuzu Dip With Furikake

Years later, the memory of those giant, buttery fruits, plucked warm from the sun-drunk trees in her grandfather’s plot of red earth, came back to her as she was trying to compose a brunch menu for her London restaurant, Jikoni (“kitchen” in Kiswahili). Brunch is a black hole for chefs. In theory, it is good: a meal without rules, unmoored from proper hour, abundant, anarchic, oversating, stupefying, staunchly opposed to those pallid guardrails of modern life, efficiency and productivity.

In 1895, the British journalist Guy Beringer — who is commonly credited with introducing the “brunch” portmanteau in print, in the short-lived periodical Hunter’s Weekly — praised the meal because “it renders early rising not only unnecessary, but ridiculous.” The argument was not for sloth but for debauchery: Bypass breakfast for brunch, and you can stay up as late as you like the night before, consequence- and conscience-free, dancing on the table and embracing ruin.

How did such a delightfully illicit meal become so staid, so forgettable? Blame us, the diners.