“Brunch, really, is the gayest meal,” my friend tells me. It’s the first frost of the winter, on the first weekend of March. Little has been written so far about the drag brunches hosted at various neighborhood bars in northern Brooklyn and southern Queens, but nonetheless their quiet popularity over the past few years seem to symbolize something and we were determined to find out what that was.

Take, for example, Ridgewood’s The Deep End, located in a former warehouse which now sport an aquatically suggestive mural and a collection of thin metal tables. As recently as last year, a local newspaper somewhat erroneously reported that “Queens’ only drag brunch” to take place far away in Astoria.

“The ladies should be here any minute,” a waiter there assured me, long after an order of caramelized french toast and something called “The Jersey Shore,” a kind of breakfast roll that comes with luscious helpings of lunch meat. (The Deep End is the creative brainchild from the operators of a modestly successful Williamsburg food truck called the “Munchie Mobile.”) Mary Con arrived first, a brash figure who quickly bemoaned her tardy partner (“that slut is probably still in bed!”) underneath a baseball cap and workout tank top. Soon enough, she was amiably strutting to the clashing pad drums of “Amazing” by Hi Fashion, a Euro-banger that appeared in a trailer for RuPaul’s Drag Race in 2013.