Fine details will make you a brunch believer

I HAVE always been at precisely the wrong life stage to truly understand brunch. Around about the time that early-2010s restaurateurs were turning smashed avocado, sharing pans of shakshuka and “bottomless” day drinking into an unstoppable formula, I was a 29-year-old newish dad, slowly awakening to the fact that early parenthood wasn’t compatible with languorous mid-afternoon meals or the speed-necking of seven mimosas within a rigorously observed 90-minute window.

I was never a teeth-grinding fundamentalist about it; never one to deny strangers the frivolous thrill of challah French toast, a very involved Bloody Mary menu and the encroaching thud of a 4pm hangover. It was more that I had made peace with the fact that, like CrossFit or ethical non-monogamy, it was a millennial obsession that I would never be wholeheartedly partaking in.

These days, however, I have belatedly started to appreciate the virtues of a capital B, Antipodean-style brunch. First came a January trip to Sydney: a place where a clothed torso counts as formal wear, and the all-day eating culture is exactly as accomplished, alluring and boundlessly inventive as every Australian you know says it is. And now I have fallen pretty hard for Tashas — a Battersea-based, first UK outpost for restaurateur Natasha Sideris’s South African cafe chain and a place that is meticulous in composition, breezy and generous in effect, and dusted with enough intangible, southern hemisphere magic to turn even the terminally brunch-averse into true believers.