New Sanno Buffet

We brought the gang along (the friends we made while snowboarding in the last post) to Sunday brunch, an all-you-can-eat buffet (Viking buffet, as it's known here) at the New Sanno hotel in Tokyo. I thought the ice sculpture on the cheese table was a little excessive, but everyone seemed suitably impressed with the food.

I learned some things.

One: fruit is not a breakfast or beginning-of-meal food for Japanese people like it is for Westerners.

Two: waffles are a dessert food, not for breakfast.

Three: sometimes a fish will be served like this, which I find really creepy, but nobody at our table could explain why there would ever be green cake frosting dotted with cherry tomatoes and olives. Or why this was just for display. I think flowers are fine decoration, but I'm obviously not thinking outside the box.


Four: the champagne they serve is really, really good.
To friends and food. かんぱい！(Kanpai, cheers!)

Waiting for a train headed back home, we realized that five out of eight of us were wearing purple. So I took a picture and the opportunity to ask what "purple" is in Japanese. I've learned most of the other colors, but that one has been eluding me.


むらさき。Murasaki = purple. Victory! I shared my newfound vocabulary with the husband, but he had to go and look it up on his phone. To my surprise, what came up was "soy sauce." Oh boy. Apparently it's pronounced the same way, but the kanji are different. One more reason to learn to read kanji, so I can tell if we're talking about soy sauce or the color purple.