Happy St. Whiteday Day

On Valentine’s day in Japan, department stores have exquisite chocolate exhibitions that put New York’s annual Chocolate Show to shame. But there are no $25 admission tickets or lines around the block - just waves of women in business black nibbling at tiny but plentiful samples as they pick up armloads of beautifully wrapped boxes to give to male co-workers as “obligation chocolate.” There’s also “honmei” chocolate that you give to your “favorite.”
Anyway, the point is that as Hallmark imported bloody St. Valentine, wrapped him in a red ribbon and made us feel guilty about not buying in his name things adorned with either cupids, hearts or thorns, Japan imported Valentine’s day, spun it around backwards and then ran with it straight into the middle of March. There, in the late seventies, a candy company decreed March 14th White Day, a day when dutiful men across the land could return the gifts of obligation and love with marshmallows and white chocolate, and later, more expensive presents. (Why not? If you make up a holiday, you get to make up the rules.)
Which brings us to Brasserie Aux Amis, a French bistro in Tokyo with, perhaps, a chalk-wielding waiter who was dead last in a game of Telephone and ended up advertising their March 14 Chocolate and Flowers prix fixe meal as a celebration of jolly old St. Whiteday.