Some foods have been assigned working hours for reasons nobody seriously questions anymore. Eggs belong to morning, pasta to evening, salad to lunch. The problem arises when you want an omelette at four in the afternoon and discover the kitchen has decided you're too late.
Breakfast is a peculiar meal, defined far more often by the clock than by the food itself. Eggs at nine are breakfast. The same eggs at one can be brunch. By six in the evening they suddenly require an explanation, as though you have violated some unspoken gastronomic convention.
These rules are not natural laws. They are a mixture of habit, working hours, family routines, industry and culture. In one part of the world the morning begins with a savoury dish; in another with sweet pastry; somewhere else with rice and fish, or simply coffee. Even the notion of what "looks like breakfast" is not especially universal.
And yet we are remarkably loyal to it. Perhaps because meals are not just food but a way of organising the day. Breakfast means something has begun; lunch that we have reached the middle; dinner that we can slow down. When we shift them, we get the strange feeling that we have shifted the day itself.
The modern city, however, is rather poor at respecting those boundaries. Someone starts work at seven, someone else at eleven. One person finishes a training session when another is finishing lunch. The Belgrade weekend in particular has little patience for the idea that breakfast must be done before noon. A city that takes a ninety-minute coffee seriously can hardly simultaneously demand military precision from its eggs.
Brunch was the first cultural compromise. The word itself acknowledges that two meals can collide and nothing terrible will happen. But brunch acquired its own rules over time: weekend, late morning, perhaps a mimosa, a plate elegant enough to photograph. What began as liberation from the schedule quickly acquired a new schedule.
All-day breakfast goes a step further. Its appeal is not to declare breakfast superior to other meals, but to stop pretending that certain foods have a natural expiry time. If a combination of eggs, vegetables, bread, cheese or avocado is a good meal at ten in the morning, its nutritional composition will not take offence because you eat it at four.
Of course, meal timing is not entirely irrelevant. Circadian biology has attracted attention in recent years for good reason, and there is evidence that the scheduling of food intake may be connected to metabolic health. But this does not follow that a poached egg after noon is a problem, nor that your body checks whether you have ordered from the correct section of the menu on your way into a restaurant.
What is more interesting is what all-day breakfast says about a changing way of life. The traditional three meals emerged in a world where a large proportion of people had a far more predictable working day. Today we eat lunch between meetings, work from cafes, train before work or after it, travel, sleep late at weekends, and often eat when we can rather than when the schedule would prefer.
This need not automatically be a good thing. A chaotic routine, constant snacking and heavy late-night meals are not the same as flexibility. But flexibility itself is not the enemy of a healthy relationship with food. Sometimes it is precisely rigidity that turns a normal meal into a complication.
There is also something pleasantly democratic about an all-day breakfast. Breakfast is probably the least ceremonial of the major meals. It demands no occasion, requires no wine that "goes with the dish," expects no three courses. It can be fast or endlessly slow, sweet or savoury, small or substantial. It can be a meeting, a first date, half an hour alone or three hours with friends.
That is why at VERA we have left breakfast with open hours. Not because we believe everyone should eat breakfast all day, but because we see no particular reason to tell them when they must stop. If someone wants eggs at five in the afternoon, perhaps they don't need an explanation. Perhaps they just need eggs.
Food is already complicated enough without assigning it shifts. There are things where timing genuinely matters: coffee before sleep, a very heavy meal deep into the night, long stretches without food for someone who doesn't tolerate that well. But the difference between breakfast at 11:55 and the same breakfast at 12:05 exists mostly in our calendar.
Perhaps in a few years all-day breakfast will sound as unnecessary as all-day coffee. Nobody today explains why it is acceptable to order an espresso after lunch; we simply order one. Eggs will probably survive the same emancipation.
Until then, we can start modestly. Let the clock show what time it is. It doesn't need to tell us what to eat.
Try it at VERA — specialty café and wellness bistro, Nikole Spasića 4, Stari Grad, Belgrade.
Breakfast at VERA →