Transgressive Luxury: So What Happened to Champagne Brunch?

Champagne brunch, for most Filipinos, has always been a borrowed fantasy—something glimpsed in films, TV shows, and the glossy pages of lifestyle magazines. It’s not quite native to our rhythms. At best, it makes a cameo during hotel buffets or resort staycations, where the logic of sulit still hovers overhead: if there’s going to be free-flowing anything, it had better be maximized, justified, earned.

So what happened to champagne brunch?

Maybe nothing. Maybe it just needed a better alibi.

At Project Vino Reserve’s new "Fork & Fizz" brunch, the answer isn’t defensive—it’s architectural. You don’t justify the drink because you inhabit the space that makes it inevitable. Nestled in the Proscenium at Rockwell, that strange and seductive pocket of Makati that feels engineered for that certain kind of life, brunch becomes less a meal and more the condition. A slow, curated suspension of the weekday’s urgency.

The Proscenium itself gestures toward a different urban fantasy. It’s a mini-city, yes, but one that understands desire: proximity, walkability, a gentle breeze that feels newly possible in the wake of efforts to rehabilitate the Pasig River. There’s a dog park. There are curated retail rows. There is a glass-walled fashion school. A theatre. There is the quiet implication that everything you need—food, drink, leisure, even community—can be accessed without rupture.

It recalls, oddly enough, the spatial logic of certain resorts in Boracay: adjoined villas arranged around a shared green space, with pathways that lead you not out into the chaos of white beach but deeper in, where quiet indulgence is not only permitted but expected. In those places, no one asks why you’re holding a cocktail at 11 a.m. The drink is part of the weather.

"Fork & Fizz" leans fully into that logic. From 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., the bubbles flow—Cava No. 1, Cava No. 11 Rosado, or Perrier-Jouët—each paired with a considered menu of brunch mains and desserts that are as substantial as they are indulgent. This isn’t the dainty, performative brunch of avocado toast minimalism. The food is deliberately substantial: Croque Madame, Monte Cristo, Eggs Royale. Dishes that insist you sit down, stay awhile, and, possibly even, share for splitsies.

Maybe that’s the other thing we forgot about brunch: it was never meant to be rushed.

The scale of the food at Project Vino Reserve demands a different tempo—one that resists the quick lunch hour and instead invites conversation, negotiation, even small rituals of division (“tikman mo ’to”). The unlimited pancakes, offered almost mischievously as an add-on, push this further into the realm of excess—not gluttony, but abundance as social glue.

You begin to notice the crowd as part of the experience itself: sundresses and crisp polos over shorts, linen and soft cotton catching the light, quite a few people standing just a little too casually, as if they might at any moment step onto a boat. There’s a choreography to glasses in hand, and small talk that floats rather than lands; there is easy intimacy of people who have collectively agreed to suspend the usual rules of the city. It is not quite a party, not quite a meal, but something in between: a shared performance of leisure.

And here’s where the pricing—initially shocking—begins to make sense. It’s not just about the cost of free-flowing sparkling wine. It’s about buying time, atmosphere, and a kind of temporary citizenship in this carefully constructed enclave. You’re not paying for brunch; you’re paying for permission to linger.

In countries with stricter regulations around alcohol, one workaround has always been pairing: embedding drink within food so that indulgence reads as sophistication rather than vice. “Fork & Fizz” operates on a similar wavelength. The bubbles are not standalone—they are framed, contextualized, almost disciplined by their culinary companions. It’s not day drinking if it’s a curated pairing over networking among the like-minded.

And yet, beneath that framing is something more quietly radical: the insistence that pleasure need not be postponed.

We are used to deferring. To earning our breaks. To treating leisure as something that must be justified by distance—by flights booked, islands reached, leave credits spent. But what if the city itself could hold that space? What if Makati could be, in its own way, an islang pantropiko—the imagined tropical elsewhere invoked in Pantropiko—not because it resembles the beach, but because it permits the same softening of rules?

In that sense, the return of champagne brunch isn’t nostalgic. It’s corrective.

It answers the question “anong oras pa lang?” with a shrug, or better yet, with a refill. It suggests that perhaps the problem was never the hour, but the context in which the hour was experienced. Put a glass of cava in a fluorescent-lit office pantry at 11 a.m., and it reads as transgression. Place it in a sunlit enclave, with a table full of food meant to be shared, and it becomes something else entirely: a ritual of pause.

Don’t we all need that pause?

Not the grand, once-a-year escape, but the smaller, more sustainable luxuries—the ones that can be folded into the rhythm of a Saturday. "Fork & Fizz" doesn’t just revive champagne brunch; it reframes it for a city that is relearning, hesitantly, how to breathe.

So what happened to champagne brunch?

It moved. It adapted. It found a new home in a place that understands that sometimes, the most radical thing you can do in a city like this is to sit down, pour a glass, and stay.

Fork & Fizz debuted on April 18. Choose among Dominio de la Vega Cava No. 1 at P3,250, Dominio de la Vega Cava No. 11 Rosado Brut (pink cava) at P3,450, and Perrier-Jouët at P5,450. Each one is inclusive of a choice of main and dessert from the brunch menu with free-flow from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., every Saturday.

Project Vino Reserve is at G/F The Proscenium Retail Row, Rockwell Center, Makati.

ALSO READ:

Not Your Basic Brunch: Project Vino Reserve in Makati Welcomes Daytime Guests

Melbourne's ST. ALi Coffee Is the Newest Brunch Spot in Manila