"Pizza" is a popular type of restaurant. "Brunch" is a popular type of meal. For this reason, some pizza restaurants believe that they can serve brunch. Not true.

I like pizza. I like brunch. If you're an average American, you like both of these things, too. Here is where I insert the sort of example that's like, "Hell, I like garlic, and I like toothpaste, but do I want garlic toothpaste? I don't think so!" Because the fact is that pizza restaurants and brunch do not go together—just like garlic and toothpaste.

You want to eat a piece of pizza at "brunch time" (11 a.m.-4 p.m. on a weekend)? That's fine. No one would complain about that. But that is not what pizza restaurants mean by "we serve brunch." What they mean is that they have lazily repurposed their staple food (pizza) into some kind of "brunch" food by remixing it in an atrocious fashion and pretending like everything is just fine.

"Brunch pizza?" That's not a kind of food that should be accepted as "okay" in polite society, any more than, say, "Dinner cheese danish" should be. There is breakfast, with eggs, and there is pizza, with tomato sauce and cheese, and these two thing simply are not meant to be combined into a single dish, no matter how much pizza restaurants wish they were because brunch is an easy way to make lots of money by taking advantage of hungry day drinkers. For example, I live near a fancy pizza place that shall remain unnamed. Its pizzas? They're great. And what do they turn out for brunch? "Brunch Pizza," with flavors like "Pear and Gorgonzola" or "Pancetta Egg and Cheese," that cost almost as much as a regular pizza, but which are clearly just thrown-together mishmashes of classic "brunch" foods that are placed atop a piece of pizza crust.

You can't just put brunch food on top of a pizza crust and call it "brunch pizza." (Or "breakfast pizza." That's the same thing.) Especially not for fifteen god damn dollars. You'll have to try harder than that, I'm afraid.

Pizza restaurants are good at making pizza. Don't get greedy.

[Photo of outlawed food: Flickr]