SEDA Vertis North’s Misto buffet is back, albeit with changes made to fit the new normal and ensure the safety of its diners.
While the hotel has offered la carte dining to serve its long-staying guests and those who crave the hotel’s specialties during the pandemic, the buffet has made a comeback, opening in late November to great success, according to Seda Vertis North’s director of sales and marketing.
“Since the launch it’s been… very well-received, which is why we are ramping up, not just for lunch on Thursdays to Sunday but we are going to launch this for dinner as well,” Cinty Yniguez, director of sales and marketing at Seda Vertis North, said in an online conference on Dec. 11 via Zoom.
The revamped “new normal” Misto buffet allows its diners to go to the buffet stations and see the spread — behind plexiglass. The restaurant’s culinary team then gets the food for them. Of course, the requisite thermal scanning is done the moment one enters the restaurant and the staff sanitizes their stations and wash their hands every 20 minutes.
The buffet stations are the grill station, the Japanese station (no raw fish, but they do serve tempura), the roast and carving station (which includes their famous roast beef and, for the holidays, their equally famous honey-glazed ham), a noodle station (with handmade noodles plus soups including laksa), a dessert station, and a bread and cheese station. In all, more than 30 dishes are served in the lunch buffet, including Filipino favorites such as kare-kare (meat stew in a thick peanut-based sauce), crispy pata (deep fried pig trotters), callos (beef tripe stew), and lengua (beef tongue). They also offer Brazilian barbecue meats (churrasco) served on skewers and sliced for the diners. The culinary team is led by its executive chef, Kerpartrik Boiser.
“We’ve [arranged] the spread like this is so that we can still showcase our buffet spread,” Ms. Yniquez explained.
Misto is the hotel’s all-day dining restaurant and with its buffet reopened, Ms. Yniguez observed that they have a lot of guests coming from the nearby villages and subdivisions in the area, the businesses nearby and government offices. Seda Vertis North is located in Quezon City, near Trinoma.
Both the lunch and dinner buffets are priced at P1,000+++ and the restaurant can only accommodate 90 people at a time. While reservations are recommended, Misto also allows walk-in guests.
And because the holidays are here and they are expecting an influx of diners, they will be having “two seatings for each meal period.” The rates for Christmas lunch and dinner are different from the regular lunch and dinner buffet prices.
For the holiday meals, Ms. Yniguez said they will be offering al fresco dining options since they have a considerable amount of outdoor space at Misto.
Ms. Yniguez said that their food and beverage is the hotel’s “bread and butter,” and “we manage [profits] by managing our costs very well… without compromising quality in the type of offerings we have on the buffet.”
Aside from the buffets, Ms. Yniguez said that the hotel has pivoted to offering food platters, delivery services, and grazing boxes as they recognize that people may still be unwilling to dine out but are still looking for hotel-quality meals.
“[The pandemic] has been an eye-opener of us… and I believe that [food platters, delivery services, and grazing boxes] are going to be a mainstay. This just opened a new world for us,” she said before adding that even after the pandemic is over, people “are still going to want to order and eat at the comfort of their homes or offices.”
Seda Vertis North is still not open for staycations, but they are “looking into that already” and hopefully they can open “by the coming year.”
For reservations, contact the hotel through 0917-833-9117 or e-mail dining.vertis@sedahotels.com. — Zsarlene B.Chua