The Camelback Inn is a Marriott luxury resort in the Scottsdale area, north of Phoenix. They started serving Sunday brunch again in September. They were closed for however long it takes to spend $50 million remodeling the building having the restaurants and the registration desk. Brunch at the Camelback Inn was long fabled as a place where important people enjoyed fine food. G. Gordon Liddy and Sandra Day O’Connor are said to have dined there, although not necessarily at the same table.

Bloggers are important too —at least I think so— so we felt obliged to check out the new digs and duly report. All is well. The decor is elegant, but preserves Southwest informality. No ties were observed. The food was uniformly excellent. All buffets feature a lot of food, but not many feature a lot of high quality food. The Camelback excels in quality.

The standard advice for buffet attack is to sample everything, then go back for what turns out to be good. That strategy is not for advanced eaters. You know at the outset that things like canned garbanzo beans are not going to be a worthwhile investment of precious calories. Strike the fillers off the list. Next strike off food that like, but which you manage to eat regularly. Omelets and scrambled eggs may be in that category. Focus on good stuff that is out of the ordinary. Of course, some not-so-out-of-the-ordinary foods are so good as to qualify for exemptions, like fresh fruit. But ponder carefully. You are never going to earn a black belt in eating if you cannot focus.

There were no canned garbanzos at the Camelback, so forget that element of the strategy. Here is my first plate:

And then the main course:

Around the left edge of the plate is arrayed watermelon, strawberries, and blackberries. I like to eat fresh fruit along with meat, an extension of the prosciutto and melon principle. Yes, it is, shall we say, non-standard. The grilled lamb, crab cakes, and sea scallops are prepared on the adjacent patio. The sea scallops proved that the key to fine food is getting the best ingredients and then not screwing them up. The scallops were memorable. That’s rather remarkable in that the Phoenix environs are weighted more heavily to beach than ocean.

Okay, now about the Humble Fog Cheese. It is Humboldt Fog Cheese suffering from some silly mix up in the name. When it comes to food, spelling definitely does not count.

Humboldt Bay is on the northern California coast, a cool climate well-suited to oysters and, apparently, to the goats producing milk for Cypress Grove’s Humboldt Fog Chevre. The award-winning cheese is ripened with a coating and interior layer of fine edible vegetable ash.

I went to the dessert area to fetch a highly-recommended, and worthwhile, chocolate cookie.The serving lady there asked, “Can I interest you in Bananas Foster today?” I told her, “Oh no, I eat like a bird.” The serving lady just smiled, but I heard an elderly woman hidden in my shadow laugh.

The buffet is hosted in Rita’s Kitchen. The phone number for reservations is difficult to find; it is 480-948-1700. Champagne is included, so we got away for about $73 per person, including taxes and tip. Remember, I did it for the blog. You’ll have to work on your own excuse. I think checking a blog post for accuracy might do.