BrunchCritic.com Founder Andrea Pappas shares more than a love of the color orange with The Michael J. Fox Foundation; she also shares a connection to Parkinson’s disease. Her father lived with the disease for nearly a decade, and passed away earlier this year. To honor his memory, she’s donating a portion of the proceeds from her second annual Signature Orange Party to the Foundation.
This sold-out event, held this Sunday in New York City, will feature cocktails and brunch-inspired plates from some of the city’s best restaurants. The only catch: guests must wear orange. “I wear a lot of orange,” says Andrea, “and people love to dress up. To me, this event embodies some of the best things about New York: great food, great fashion and contributing to a great cause.”
Andrea launched BrunchCritic.com to fill a void, as she was frustrated by the lack of food-related Web sites dedicated to her favorite meal: brunch. “My favorite activity of the week was going to brunch with my friends each weekend. We’d share what we wanted in life and would often bring along other friends, so we could meet new people. I was the one who did the research to figure out where to go.” To keep track of the different brunch spots she’d explored, she created an Excel spreadsheet—which would become the foundation for her site.
Today it’s the city’s only all-brunch resource, aimed to help others find the perfect venue. “There are so many great brunch places, but people only know about a few. So those spots often have a wait of up to two hours. New Yorkers work hard. They shouldn’t have to work hard or wait so long to find a good brunch place. That’s where our site comes in.”
She credits her mother with inspiring her “penchant for pancakes,” who made them for her every day until she was 12. Pancakes—with lots of syrup—are still her favorite dish. From her father, she gained a desire to give back to her community, and her tremendous energy. “My father was really active in San Diego’s Greek Orthodox community. And as an engineer, he was always doing something with his hands,” she says. While he struggled with other health issues, his Parkinson’s affected him most deeply. “His self-worth had been so invested in his ability to physically do things, and PD really slowed him down.” After he passed away, she wanted to channel her passion for brunch into something that could help people like her father. She’s excited to contribute to MJFF, because she values the Foundation’s focus on being smarter about how research is funded and conducted.
For Andrea, the greatest challenge of putting together an event like the Signature Orange Party is coordinating all the logistics, from what you’ll serve, to what you’ll serve it on, to who gets what space in the kitchen— and making sure all the attendees are taken care of, feel at home, and are engaged. But its greatest reward is exposing people to new restaurants, and to raising awareness for a cause that might be new to them. “Not everyone knows what Parkinson’s really is, or that it’s progressive and affects people differently,” she says. Andrea is also eager to bring new people together. “Brunch is breakfast without an alarm clock, good conversation and a great group of people,” she says. “It’s really a pleasure bringing people together and with the Orange Party, we create a unique environment where they can form new relationships.”