The Royal Hawaiian Hotel has never been known for Sunday brunch, having ceded the territory to the Moana Surfrider and Halekulani. But that has changed. By day the hotel’s Azure restaurant is re-dubbed the Surf Lanai, open for breakfast, lunch and Sunday brunch in the same upscale, al fresco waterfront setting.

Brunch is always welcome in a town with too few lazy Sunday breakfast options, though being the Royal, you can expect to pay the princely sum of $68 per person, plus tax and tip. Even those who weren’t A students in math can calculate whether they can eat $68 worth of food.

But let’s not discount some of the other attractions that one particular credit card company would deem priceless: the beach setting that people pay thousands of dollars to experience firsthand, an afternoon of relaxed noshing, the company of beloved family and friends.

Time it just between breakfast and dinner, and it could also make your three-meals-a-day quota, bringing the cost to approximately $23 per meal. I know, I know, it’s not pretty to gorge. We’re all better off with six small meals a day the way we puny humans would have foraged for nuts, fruit, insects and lizards, before developing the tools for big-game hunting, baking and molecular gastronomy. But, gorge I did, and after finishing up at about 2 p.m., I didn’t feel hungry for the rest of the day, not even for a midnight snack.

So what’s the attraction? It could be that people eat with their eyes first, because up front when you enter the Surf Lanai is an array of colorful desserts to your right. We’ll get to those later.

On your left are carving stations featuring dry-aged prime rib and a whole roasted suckling pig, also likely to draw visitors more accustomed to seeing their pork in the form of fillets and cutlets. It’s also where I headed first for the lure of golden, crackling pork skin, served with Chinese bao and a choice of tamarind or hoisin sauce.

Next up was making the rounds of the sushi station, where you can pick up pieces of nigiri and maki sushi, as well as ahi, hamachi and salmon sashimi and assorted kim chee, or have the attendant chef make something for you.

I hate overeating, but this was the value calculation at work. I love breakfast and like nothing more than scrambled eggs, hash browns, breakfast meat or a good omelet in the morning. Normally, if I want sushi, I just go to a Japanese restaurant, but when it’s so readily accessible, who could resist?

The high-value seafood and shellfish are also toward the front of the extravagant buffet, including gingery ahi poke, chilled shrimp and crab claws, and a pot of oysters steamed in herbs and broth, with bits of bacon and Ho Farms tomato. For the non-seafood eater, there was also a shiitake poke, but I didn’t care for the intense soy-sauce flavor. When I see mushrooms cut that way, I’m more accustomed to having them sauteed in butter and herbs.

Even if it was a matter of trying one piece of poke, one piece of tako poke and one clam, I really worked at trying everything but could only make it through half the buffet. I believe my downfall was the breakfast foods, particularly the combination of crisp bacon, scrambled eggs and onion-bacon rosti, a upscale take on hash browns. The potatoes did me in.

As proof that most people are wise to avoiding carbo-loading in such situations, I had, on early rounds, inspected a pan of chow mein that was full of whole jumbo shrimp and large pieces of chicken. When I returned to the pan a half-hour later, all the shrimp and meat were gone, leaving only the noodles!

Other highlights were a whole Chinese-style steamed onaga, a waffle station and an omelet station with such ingredients as ham and cheese, green onions, spinach, tomatoes, shrimp and Ali’i mushrooms. To go with your eggs are miniature, individual bottles of ketchup and Tabasco sauce, which is a nice touch as it’s much cleaner than passed bottles.

And rounding out the buffet were dishes I never got to, such as the breads, king-size house-made lavash, artisanal cheeses, salads and eggs Benedicts.

For dessert I enjoyed a miniwaffle with whipped cream, blueberries and strawberries, plus a macaroon. I was too full to explore much more, although a raspberry trifle, coffee flan and the Royal’s signature pink haupia cake looked divine, and many others appeared to be enjoying the pavlovas, pointy white meringues that could be topped with whipped cream and strawberries.

It’s always a good sign when a buffet proves to be much bigger than the size of your opu.

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Nadine Kam‘s restaurant reviews are conducted anonymously and paid for by the Star-Advertiser. Reach her at nkam@staradvertiser.com.