NOBU at One&Only Cape Town has launched a brunch on the last Saturday of the month, and as the invitation said, “it’s quite an indulgent affair” and “essentially wave after wave of Nobu food being served, accompanied by free-flowing wine”. It is an accurate assessment.
They call it brunch, and it does begin before high noon, but it can be seen as a marathon of feasting, and can quite easily be your one and only meal of the day (yes, I know what I did there). With a glass of bubbly as a welcome drink, bowls of edamame beans, and chicken tacos are served at the table to get those juices flowing. After that, you can head to the cold buffet as many times as you want. My savoury palate’s reaction to the variety of dishes must be the equivalent of a kid in a candy store.
I went back several times for more of the salmon skin salad. More accurately, for the salmon skin. Other folk might want a bag of potato crisps; I want a bucket of crispy salmon skins. Yum! The spinach salad is apparently the most-requested recipe, and that could be to do with the delicious mushrooms, which I picked out and devoured. There is a massive platter of oysters, of course.
Yellowtail jalapeño (pictured below), new style salmon (and springbok), and beef tataki take their places alongside tuna sashimi salad, all sorts of sushi rolls, and nigiri – whitefish, tuna, salmon and shrimp (prawn). Wooden boxes contain rock shrimp tempura (droooooool, see above), crispy calamari, and kinglip amazu.
After a while, you can order your hot dish (fret not, the cold buffet isn’t going anywhere yet): beef or chicken yakatori, and shrimp quinoa yuzu truffle are on the menu but really, the only choice is the black cod with butter lettuce (pictured below) which is so rich and downright flipping amazing you’ll never want to eat another fish in your whole life ever again. Good luck with that; four pieces on the normal menu is R450 (the brunch portion is two pieces). Put it on your wish list, and if you’re paying, invite me along.
After you’ve wandered back to the buffet for more of your favourites tastes, there’s still dessert. This includes cheese, macarons, teeny tiny canele, lime spring rolls, malva pudding, lemon meringue, chocolate cake, pineapple bavarois, green tea raspberry opera cake, ice cream and sorbet.
Be sure to set aside adequate time for this; it’s not something that should be rushed, but savoured for as long as possible. The brunches are on the last Saturday of every month from 11.30am until 2.30pm, for R1380 per person. Background tunes are provided by a DJ (pictured below). For more information, click here.
PHOTO CREDIT: BIANCA COLEMAN ©
