Let’s do brunch

After a late Saturday night spent carousing (or in my case, lying in bed watching TV after putting my daughter to sleep), it’s a guilty pleasure to wake up late on a Sunday and eat my first meal close to noon. Since my head’s still fragile from the previous night, ideally this meal should be held in a quiet place, with an unhurried pace that allows me to read the paper at leisure and consume as many cups of strong coffee as I wish.

What I consider a guilty pleasure the rest of the world calls brunch, that hybrid meal that combines breakfast and lunch. Brunch was actually invented by the Brits, and the term was coined in 1896 by British writer Guy Beringer, who wrote for Hunter’s Weekly. Apparently, hunters from the noble class would come home late in the morning ravenously hungry from their exploits, and would then proceed to eat the kind of tidbits only enjoyed by the rich, like pheasant legs dipped in mustard.

While the privileged classes in Britain had made brunch fashionable around the turn of the century (after all, who had the leisure and largesse to enjoy the pleasures of food during that period except the aristos?) in the US, brunch didn’t catch on till the Thirties, where it took a more democratic turn and became the meal night owls could take if they woke up too late for breakfast.

Today it’s a regular part of many hotel and restaurant menus, but in Manila, where the eat-all-you-can breakfast buffet rules, it was hard to find a great eatery that served brunch.

Until two weeks ago, when the ultimate brunch place opened at Makati Shangri-La. At long last the hotel’s restaurant Red has thrown open its doors on Sunday from 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. (when the last orders are taken, though you can hang out till 4), and it’s the perfect antidote to the Saturday-night hangover.

"It’s hard to find a quiet place for quality time with your extended family, where you feel at home," says Joy Wassmer, Makati Shangri-La’s director of communications. "At Red you feel like you have the dining room all to yourself – it’s a bit laid-back and secluded."

Theater kitchens are great fun – those circus-like buffets swirling with family activity and the playful shouts of kids on the loose – but when your head’s pounding from Saturday night shenanigans, there’s nothing like lounging in Red’s cocoon-like chairs and looking out the window at the garden view. Plush furnishings, crisp white table linen and wall-to-wall carpeting thoughtfully muffle all sound, so nothing will jar you from your contemplative state.

They say you should feed a hangover much like you would feed a cold, and for brunch, nobody will say anything if you order a touch more alcohol – in fact, it’s encouraged. While a mimosa is standard fare, at Red you can go even classier with a flute of Veuve Cliquot champagne to go with your food.

Here you have the option of going light or heavy with your meal. For big appetites there’s a four-course set menu with choices of appetizer, soup, entrée and dessert for P980++ per person (P1,580++ with a glass of champagne), while those who eat like a bird can order a la carte from the Sunday menu, which offers dishes not available on Red’s regular lunch menu.

Eggs Benedict, steak a la pobre – you won’t find this kind of brunch fare on Red’s menu. Instead, grilled seafood, roasted meat and fresh greens prevail.

"We had some new ideas so we didn’t want to go the classical -brunch way," says Chris Romaine, Makati Shangri-La’s executive chef, who collaborated with Red’s Pinoy chef Jojo Borlagdan on the menu. "What we’re serving is lighter, fresher, healthier."

Since breakfast or brunch is my favorite meal of the day, my husband, Scott, and I went for the four-course set menu. To start I chose the pan-seared salmon napoleon in a miso glacé, wrapped with a strip of nori seaweed and served with asparagus fritters. For an appetizer this was generously portioned, with two small salmon fillets on top of each other, so I passed one on to my husband to try.

He ordered the tomato and mozzarella with basil pesto and Parmesan, an interesting take on the Italian insalata Caprese, in which the authentic mozzarella buffala is layered vertically between slices of tomato. Both dishes boast fresh produce, wake-up-call flavors and strikingly tall presentations in contrast to another appetizer, mixed highland garden greens with a trio of smoked fish, which was long and flat instead. A must for fish-lovers, this salad also features Shangri-La’s famously good mango salsa in a round of Melba toast.

I’m also a soup person so I had to try Red’s version of minestrone, which is possibly my favorite version ever, with its crisp vegetables, expertly seasoned broth and welcome addition of flat noodles. Scott had the pumpkin cream soup, with a nice infusion of nutmeg he could fully taste as he got to the bottom of the bowl.

In my house, no one can cook fish the luxurious, restaurant way (filleted, with fins taken out), so whenever I eat out I take full advantage. For the entree I had to try the island snapper coated in herbs and served with a mushroom risotto, tomato concassee and ginger butter, and I’m glad I did: the fish is grilled to perfection and the risotto is as superb as it is in Circles, Makati Shang’s 12-country buffet.

Scott had the grilled seafood with basil pesto, penne pasta and baby eggplant, which he pronounced "very good" and which became his favorite dish. He actually ordered it for the pesto and penne (he loves penne) but the combination of grilled sea bass, prawn, lapu-lapu, tuna, salmon and squid was just right: not too heavy, really tasty, and more savory than you might think.

Since we had gorged ourselves on seafood, we expected to feel stuffed, but the perfectly sized portions and healthy way of cooking left us feeling satisfied yet game for dessert, and we sampled all three. The New York cheesecake was especially good with the yogurt ice cream, framed in a cup fashioned from caramelized sugar. I love meringue so the pavlova with passion-fruit coulis was a no-brainer: air-light kisses of sugar tempered by the coolness of the ice cream. Best of all was the warm cherry cobbler with its crumbly crust, perfectly complemented by vanilla ice cream. All desserts are served a la mode, and end brunch on a fun note.

"Red provides a more elegant ambience, away from the hustle and bustle," says Jarlath Lynch, Makati Shangri-La’s general manager. "You can have style and elegance on a Sunday, too."

So, in the words of the immortal Beringer, "To be fashionable nowadays we must ‘brunch.’"