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It's 6 a.m. when my alarm starts squawking. I'm hung over from the night before as I drag my dehydrated corpse out of bed and get ready for work. While the rest of the city beings to ponder the most taxing question of the day – where should we go for brunch? – I'm already at the restaurant where I work, mixing pancake batter and frying potatoes.

I'm not the only one who dreads brunch; most of my industry peers feel the same way. But this meal from hell is a necessary evil and someone's got to cook it.

“Everyone wants to go to brunch,” the Air Canada Centre's new executive chef, Robert Bartley, said. “No one wants to work it.”

The citizens of this city are addicted to their mid-morning mimosas and plates dripping with hollandaise. They pound their fists on tables while harried servers and a bare-bones kitchen crew scurry to fill their gaping maws with food and drink.

Aside from the early-morning start, which comes after a late-night closing that inevitably resulted in one too many Jager shots with the crew, the horrible customers are in the same state as the wretched cooks and servers.

“I hate not being able to go out on a Saturday night. If I do, I just watch the time tick by until 3, knowing I have to get up at 8,” says Cory Vitiello, co-owner of the Harbord Room, where the staff double-shifts brunch and dinner and finishes around 11 p.m. Sunday.

“We do brunch to establish ourselves in the community,” added Mr. Vitiello about his much-lauded 35-seat restaurant. “We don't do it for the money – in a place this size we don't make any.”

This pseudo-meal has another handicap: staff size.

For a typical weekend dinner service you have what is a relative army manning the kitchen: two cooks doing salads, apps and desserts; a saucier manning the grill; a poisonnier on fish; an entremetier cooking vegetables for all entrees; a sous chef helping to plate and expedite the completed dishes to the head chef, who expedites the dishes out to the tables.

For brunch, there are usually three people. It's torture, but it's not worth the restaurant's labour cost to pay for more cooks. “We do three times the customers that we do at dinner and make half the money,” said Matty Matheson, chef at OddFellows, a Queen Street eatery recently featured in a New York Times travel story.

Brunch might fill the seats, but chefs are terrified from the get-go, their overworked, partied-out staff at the end of their tether. “Brunch is hell,” said freelance food writer and former chef of the Riverside Café, Signe Langford.

“You've just pried yourself out of bed way too early after a stupidly busy Saturday night. You walk into the kitchen and do the math: I was here five hours ago. Soon, the dining room fills with crabby, hung-over SOBs too lazy to crack a freakin' egg, all suffering from low blood sugar and caffeine withdrawal. At the stove, your arms burn with a thousand bee-stings of spitting bacon fat, and your sous quietly works under the black cloud of your hollandaise breaking in the middle of a rush. Yes, brunch is hell.”

For the puritans out there, let's say my delinquent cohorts and I go to bed early the night before, completely sober and get our eight hours. Would we still hate brunch? Yes, we would still hate it. Because brunch gets no respect, customers treat the restaurant like it's their own, disregarding the general rules of the game.

The menu gets tossed out as they come up with variations on dishes faster than the server can write, while their children run screaming past the line-up of people livid with rage that they have to wait for a table at noon on a Sunday. They leave us in the kitchen speechless with their ridiculous requests, more picky about their $5 plate of eggs at brunch than their $40 plate of steak at dinner.

Ashley Shortall, former server at the Dakota, Poor John's Café and Gabby's, reminisces on her old customers. “They'll order a coffee, O.J., water, a Caesar, ‘Oh no, could you make that a mimosa?' [And] some obnoxious hipster who is all, like, ‘Hey, look how many drinks I need, yo!'” wrote Ms. Shortall in an e-mail. “Check out the weekend warrior. Whatever.”

Brad Long, executive chef and owner of Veritas, remembers suffering through a Sunday brunch buffet almost 15 years ago when he was chef at the CN Tower. “It was a one-day mounting of a massive array of absolutely everything for 1,200 completely indifferent, astoundingly rude, self-starved weasels who piled huge masses of anything they perceived to be expensive on their plates, avoiding the delicate salads, artisanal breads and local fruit platters,” he recalled. “They ate until their eyes rolled back in their heads like an army of Mr. Creosotes, and then invariably complained that it was too expensive.”

Now don't get me wrong here, you would never be such a jerk as to show up with 17 of your dearest friends with no reservation, order one of every drink on the menu, plus a soy latte, your eggs a quarter of the way between over-easy and over-medium with a slice each of rye and whole-wheat toast and a wedge of dragonfruit – rather than grapefruit – to garnish the plate.

You are not that jerk, you are a good person and you want food made with love so I'll finish with a few tips that'll bring back that lovin' feelin.'