The "Sunday Breakfast" Tradition

After reading this passage I've begun to realize why Bill Bryson deserved his honorary OBE. By the way, I didn't know about this "Sunday breakfast" tradition he's talked about in The Lost Continent. Possibly it exists mostly in the agricultural areas, with some spillover into the suburbs, courtesy of the IHOP.

Note: I don't eat more than half the stuff that appears on the Sunday breakfast menu, but, boy, it's nearly lunchtime here and this recital's made me starve. (As it is, I've got a great lunch waiting for me - a rarity, in my case.) So, while you're savoring the words, I'm going off to have my bite.

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Everybody in America goes out for Sunday breakfast. It is such a popular pastime that you generally have to line up for a table, but it's always worth the wait. Indeed, the inability to achieve instant oral gratification is such an unusual experience in America that lining up actually intensifies the pleasure. You wouldn't want to do it all the time, of course, you wouldn't want to get British about it or anything, but once a week for twenty minutes is "kinda neat", as they say. One reason you have to line up is that it takes the waitress about thirty minutes just to take each order. First you have to tell her whether you want your eggs sunny-side up, over easy, scrambled, poached, parboiled, or in an omelette, and in an omelette, whether you want it to be a plain, cheese, vegetable, hot-spicy, or chocolate-nut-'n'-fudge omelette; and then you have to decide whether you want your toast on white, rye, whole wheat, sourdough, or pumpernickel bread and whether you want whipped butter, pat butter, or low-cholesterol butter substitute; and then there's a complicated period of negotiation in which you ask if you can have cornflakes instead of the cinnamon roll and link sausages instead of patties. So the waitress, who is only sixteen years old and not real smart, has to go off to the manager and ask him whether that's possible, and she comes back and tells you that you can't have cornflakes instead of the cinnamon roll, but you can have Idaho fries instead of the short stack of pancakes, or you can have an English muffin and bacon instead of a whole wheat toast, but only if you order a side of hashed browns and a large orange juice. This is unacceptable to you and you decide you will have waffles instead, so the waitress has to rub everything out with her nubby eraser and start all over again. And across the room, the line on the other side of the "Please Wait to Be Seated" board grows longer and longer, but the people don't mind because the food smells so good and, anyway, all this waiting is, as I say, kinda neat.