San-Qi perfects the Asian Sunday brunch

Being a culture big on food and family outings makes the Sunday brunch in Mumbai a particularly lucrative sweet spot for most major hotels and stand-alone restaurants like Olive, Blue Frog and Tote on the turf. 

Champage and sushi are now de rigueur on the Sunday menu. So is spending anywhere from Rs 2,500 to Rs 3,500 per head, especially if it includes those two. 

You aren't to ask what style of champagne, or whether sushi includes nigiri because those are considered buzz kill questions -- a painful reminder of what it could be -- and this puts you in the league of no-fun-for-brunch company. 

So Mumbai's worldly brunch connoisseurs behave like sports, pour cranberry juice into Sula Brut, pop plain cucumber maki rolls and clap their hands like Gujarati vegetarians at a dandiya dance.

In this state of affairs the Four Seasons Hotel Essence Brunch at San-Qi comes as a total revelation, and a reaffirmation, of the intended sumptuousness of Sunday brunch culture -- but in an Asian context.

No chafing dishes, no name tags, and a coterie of chefs popping out from behind stacks of steaming dim sum boxes to answer questions.

We pick the Piper-Heidsieck Brut champagne over a deadly watermelon martini and plan a battle strategy for this smorgasbord. 

My favorite word for the San-Qi buffet, other than Asian, is 'fresh.'

The maki is cut from a roll, fresh. The green salads are freshly tossed in a massive bowl at the counter. The oysters, lobsters, crabs and mussels don't evoke fear of food poisoning because they are, and look, fresh.

The Cantonese duck and charcuterie is sliced, fresh. The chèvre is so moist, you consider spending the Rs 3,000 plus taxes brunch cost just on bread and goats' cheese.

Then better sense prevails, because the Thai fried fish cakes with onion and cucumber relish can give the melting Japanese tenderloin teppanyaki a run for its money.

The Cantonese Peking duck competes with its neighboring spare ribs and the Indian fare is presented in a fashion so appealing you want to take those rows of adorable mini copper handis home in your handbag.

Finding a way to modernize Indian cuisine by bringing design sense to the presentation.

A table-side chat with Jasjit Singh Assi, assistant food and beverage manager, reveals the hotel's plans to introduce the idea of floating tables soon. Which means you won't have to line up and wait for the chefs to prepare your dishes, you simply leave them a card with your table number.

They'll send your food to you when it's ready, leaving you with more time and room to socialize -- a very important aspect of the Sunday brunch. 

Also, nothing goes better with socializing than smoking. To that end, they have a rectangular outdoor lounge area with garden furniture and many green palms, which Assi wants to turn into a sort of mini all-day beer garden in the back.

"Where people can laze around out all afternoon and into the evening," he says.

The outdoor lounge is where we head for a mini stroll before dessert. 

Back inside and round a back corner of the restaurant's lower level, the brunch's dessert section looks like something out of Alice's Wonderland for sheer color, visual appeal and childish comfort. 

An ice cream sundae counter has gummy bear toppings, bricks of chocolate on which are placed freshly hand-crafted chocolate truffles and apple pie comes with speckled fresh vanilla cream in little glass bottles.

A perfect whipped cream twist on top of fresh waffles and multi-colored French pastries dusted with fine powerded sugar fills the counter table. 

The desserts are too good to be true unfortunately, and it all tasts as unreal as it looks. 

Which means it's time to haul the kids from the special kids section where they've feasted on burgers, dogs, marshmallows and M&Ms for four hours, into the elevator to go down a single floor (how thoughtful) to enter the digestively helpful air-conditioning of the car.

Essence Brunch at San-Qi is Rs 3,000 plus taxes for adults, which includes champagne, mojitos and daiquiris, Kingfisher beer, red and white house wine and mocktails to order. Rs 1,000 for children plus taxes. Brunch timings: 12:30 - 4 p.m.

San-Qi, Four Seasons Hotel Mumbai, 114 Dr. E. Moses Road, Worli; +91 (0) 2481 8333; www.fourseasons.com/mumbai

Salad starters include beetroot and sesame, potato and gherkin, cucumber and mint, artichoke and chili and beans and rosemary.

San-Qi is a two-level, ground floor restaurant that floods with light during brunch time.