The Terra Nova All-Suite Hotel holds itself to a higher standard, and that heightened customer expectation of excellence rings true (and is delivered) with the hotel’s revamped Sunday brunch.

“We have slashed our prices but we haven’t slashed the quality,” the hotel’s trusted food and beverage consultant Ardelle Dalla Costa shares with us when we pop in, minutes before the start of brunch service last weekend.

Families with rambunctious children and couples are already queuing up, and seated outside The Venetian, the hotel’s designated spot for its well-regarded dining engagement.

Of the restructured menu, Dalla Costa notes, “We have new menu items, and the setting is now a lot more intimate, broken up with palms and different settings.”

While the hotel’s signature roast suckling pig has stayed put on the buffet line, she divulges that brunch’s four basic groups — chicken, pork, fish and beef — will serve up fresh options from one week to next.

“Today, we have a stir-fried beef, but next week we will prepare the beef a different way; the same applies to chicken and other dishes. You will have all the basics, but the way in which they are prepared will vary from week to week.”

That rule of thumb will also weigh in at the cold buffet salad station (last Sunday’s included crunchy Asian salad, tomato wedges with basil, marinated cray fish, jerked chicken salad, pickled cucumber) and the dessert table (which offered chocolate mousse, Terra Nova trifle, pina colado pudding, strawberry-topped carrot cake, chocolate swirl cupcakes), both of which will have flexible menu options.

“From that point of view, people get bored very quickly, and I think it’s important that we make it fresh and new all the time,” Dalla Costa justifies the evolving buffet now part of the brunch dynamic.

Going forward, the consultant says she envisions innovating brunch “to where we do some of it on the outside, but that can only be in the cooler months and we have plans for that.”

With a fresh take on Sunday brunch now up and running, next on the drawing board at the hotel will be a transitional refurbishing of The Terrace and a subtle tinkering with the menu.

“The Terrace,” she adds, “has become known for Jamaican traditional cuisine, and they do the best stewed peas and curried goat you could ever want, in what is undeniably a lovely setting. A lot of people have come to recognise that this is the place you go if you want great Jamaican food.”

We cannot argue with that.

— Omar Tomlinson

Terra Nova All-Suite’s Sunday brunch runs $3,300 per person (inclusive of taxes and service charge) and is available from 11:00 am to 4:00 pm.