Thursday, November 01, 2007

Kaiseki

I really enjoyed the views at the Park Hyatt once I got used to being so high up. The hotel is different in that you walk into the building and then take an elevator to the lobby which is on the 41st floor. The first forty floors of the building are restaurants, shops, and offices. The hotel part of the building begins at the 41st floor and goes up from there.

We decided to just eat at the hotel our first night. One of the restaurants at the Park Hyatt has traditional Japanese food, so we figured that a drink in the bar, dinner in the restaurant, and collapsing into bed was just about all we could handle that evening.

First, we had a drink in the bar where we took in the city lights. Then, we walked over to the restaurant and gorged on a traditional Kaiseki meal. I knew from reading in the guidebooks that Kaiseki is a multi-course meal, but I certainly didn't expect it to be as much food as it ended up being. I'm tellin' ya that it went on...and on...and...on; all served by women dressed up in kimonos wearing the little backpacks.

Yes, of course I ate it all; every last drop...and some of Mrs. TBF's food too!

My favorite course was sukiyaki which is now rivaling sushi as my favorite Japanese food. I've now come to realize that any kind of dish (like sukiyaki) that involves a raw egg is fine by me! And, of course, we washed down the food with sake.

Here's an equation for you:

pre-dinner cocktail + Kaiseki + sake = coma

We somehow managed to sleepwalk back to our room, collapsed into bed, and didn't wake up for a long, LONG time.

2 comments:

Greg said...

Did they use the backpacks to carry the some of the food and drink around? Perhaps a sake dispenser would be cool.

The Big Finn said...

greg - The backpacks were just for show, but I like the sake dispenser idea.