Almost every Sunday, in Mauritius we treated ourselves to brunch at Le Saint Geran. This was one of our favourite meals as a family and the surroundings were idyllic  and very different to the town where we lived which, like most towns in Mauritius was unattractive and unplanned. Thank goodness for all the bamboo hedges and tropical creepers which hid so much ugliness.

I will never forget going to a local hotel for a drink, one evening, when out of the blue a piece of cement from the ceiling fell into my Campari.  We immediately beat a hasty retreat in case the whole ceiling came crashing down on us. The attractive hotels were not in town but on the coast. I believe they still are.

I don't recall having brunch, either here or abroad, since those happy days. So an invitation from Charlene Le Gall, Marketing manager of the Intercontinental, came as a welcome surprise. It was a Champagne brunch too, which flowed and flowed - a change from my mug of coffee and quaker oats mornings.

If you are expecting to find large platters of pink Danish salami, rice salad, chewy sausages, fatty bacon and limp fried eggs and tons and tons of bread rolls it ain't necessarily so at Waterbiscuit. Anyone who has already had dinner at this restaurant will know that already. I love their food.

And if you are after a quick meal this is not the place to come either. This champagne brunch is a refined affair and preferably for grownups only I would think, unless you have small children who are well behaved. This is not the kind of restaurant where undisciplined children are allowed to run amok ruining everyone's Sunday morning with their wailing and their demands.  Nor is it a restaurant where you will want to pile up your plate with anything and everything mixing fish, meat, pasta. These are the kind of images that spring to mind at the mention of the word 'buffet'. This is what happens all over Malta where Sunday buffet lunches are served. We still suffer from the Great Seige syndrome here and are determined, at the risk of killing ourselves, to get value for money.

The Waterbiscuit brunch is for the discerning who enjoy their food and want to eat at leisure and taste every morsel, every sip.

There is a beverage package: Pommery champagne, fresh orange juice, carrot and apple juice and beet, apple and mint juice. The menu is truly a feast. Starters include the classic egg Benedict. I loved the savoury stuffed croissant with Parma ham and cheese and the muffins with smoked salmon caviar and cream cheese. I never have anything like this for Sunday breakfast, as you can imagine.

Next came five dishes among them my two favourites: local goats' cheese royal, candied walnuts, port and vanilla emulsion and veal carpaccio, truffle dressing pecorino cheese shavings all beautifully presented.

For pasta lovers spaghetti was served with chorizo, calamari and cherry tomatoes. We also enjoyed the garganelli with beef, mushrooms and a smoked garlic infused cream sauce. It is an innovative menu with new taste combinations which work very well.

There was a large selection for the main course too. For fish lovers the seared salmon with asparagus and Hollandaise sauce was delicious as was the steamed smoky sea bass, kalamata olives and aubergine caviar. Gloomy news about depleted fish stocks, the environmental drawbacks of fish farming which have thrust fish into the headlines doesn't seem to have affected our consumption of marine life. This is also because everyone says that fish is good for us.

Being a pastry lover and as witness of this I have my large girth, I loved the aubergine, tomato and Parmesan tart. We were served platefuls of perfectly cooked homemade fries which were impossible to avoid as were the dishfuls of rocket salad, cherry tomatoes and cheese shavings.

This was a truly leisurely breakfast and I had left my diet at the door (what's new?) and indulged in the diversity of food and drink provided. I thought to myself, as I was eating a morsel of the raspberry cheesecake, the crunch chocolate mousse and a few bites of the lemon tart, this is certainly far from the food of my student days.

How can I ever forget one landlady's curry which she thought was haute cuisine. She made it with the last remains of Sunday's already overcooked, grey and dry roast lamb. The meat was fried in lamb fat with an onion and a spoonful of 'curry powder' which had lived for a couple of years in her larder and was stale. Then lots of water was added and sultanas, of which she ate half as she was cooking, while drinking a glass of sherry. Then apples, bananas and potatoes and anything else rotting in the fridge were chucked into the pot and the kitchen sink. The lot was then boiled and served to us poor students who lodged with her. I was far from being a connoisseur of curries then but I had watched her cooking it once, when she wanted to relate to me one more time how she had allowed herself to be seduced on his narrow sofa, by a Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine as she thought he would know his way around more than anyone else and how disappointing it had been. Well, since watching her cook this mess it became impossible for me to eat it. I soon moved to digs where I could cook my own food.

So, yes, the Waterbiscuit brunch is a sophisticated  affair and just what one needs on Sundays after a week  of battling the traffic and stress at work.

Unfortunately I shall never be in a position, like Nigel Lawson and so many others, to lose a number of stone and write a diet book and appear on the cover, a third of my size, in a leotard. Anyway, I have never believed that thinness is a virtue.    

Certainly this champagne breakfast did not give me a chance to fall out of love with food. On the contrary.    It was a treat and gave us the chance to slow down.