Wednesday, June 13, 2018

Ramadan 2018 - Meals

One of the nice things about Ramadan is that you get a lot of invites to iftars or sohours. Whether from friends or corporate events there's plenty of opportunity to eat out. One would think since Ramadan is about fasting people would generally lose weight but it's usually the reverse, once the sun sets the eating begins! I think I've been doing pretty good this year, trying not to overdo it at buffets and when I'm at home my meals are definitely low-cal (soups, vegetables, tuna, low-cal protein bars).

Here was what I was up to this month:

W Hotel iftar buffet. A popular venue and has a reputation for some of the best sushi in town. I was here twice on different invitations, which shows how popular it is with corporate groups as well.




Mondrian sohour tent. Actually their main ballroom decorated in an Orientalist tent style. Beautiful room, was the nicest decorations of any of the hotels that I ate at. They also had an Austrian dessert section with strudels! Not something that I was expecting for sohour but they were delicious.






St. Regis iftar. Popular with my Qatari friends, we've gone every year for the last three years. This time there was something like 20 of us for the buffet.





Kempinski (Pearl) iftar. I've only been to this hotel once before but they put out a nice spread. We arrived early which is why it looks empty.







Iftar/sohour at friends' homes. More often sohour than iftar (you need to go pray after iftar so if you have friends over the meal will not be hours long). Traditional platters of meat or seafood on rice. You all sit on the floor and eat using your right hand.





Like I said, it's not easy to resist digging in when you go have these lavish meals. I'm not going to rate the hotels, they all had nice food. I will say that some of them (not naming names) had the tables too close together in order to pack in as many people as they could, which got annoying at times. Every place I went to was packed so if the tables were too close it was a challenge getting around and having people constantly passing by your chair.

Alas, Ramadan is almost over and so no more big buffets.

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