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Also in this set: 1 Piece · 1 Sugar Bowl · 1 Lid
Pastel flowers bloom on one side of Noritake's Sweet Surprise, beside an open field of white porcelain. Noritake of Japan first offered Sweet Surprise in 1983. Read its story.
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Sweet Surprise belongs to Noritake's New Traditions line, and the pattern lives up to that name by setting an old-fashioned bouquet in a modern way. Here the flowers gather on one side only, while a crisp geometric band frames them, so the set feels romantic and tailored at once.
In 1914 Noritake completed the Sedan, its first dinner set in the Western style. Decades later, Sweet Surprise is about restraint, its open white base doing as much work as the flowers and giving each serving piece room to breathe.
Petals of pale yellow, soft blue and pink open like a spring bouquet against the pale ground, and gold trim edges the serving pieces with a warm gleam. Together, they bring that bloom to the table in every season.
Noritake began with a journey across an ocean. In 1876 Ichizaemon Morimura and his brother Toyo founded a trading firm, and Toyo soon opened a business in New York selling Japanese goods. In 1904 the family founded the company whose factory rose at Noritake, near Nagoya, to make porcelain of its own.
Its great moment came in 1914. That year the house completed its first Western-style service, called Sedan, made to rival the porcelain of Europe. Large orders soon came from the United States. Collectors still prize the hand-painted porcelain of its early Nippon era, and by the late 1920s buyers simply called the china Noritake.
The beloved Japanese house still makes its home in Nagoya, where the Noritake Garden shows its ceramics being made. By the late 1960s its name had become a household word in Australia. Its porcelain is now loved in homes far beyond the shores where it began, and knowing collectors gather it wherever they find it. They know each piece belongs to a story that began with a journey across an ocean.
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