Asia is a crazy place. These restaurants just further prove that point. Whether they are purely a tourist attraction or serve some other kind of weird purpose, these oddly (that’s putting it lightly) themed restaurants can be found scattered throughout Asia. Just like sexual fetishes, there seems to be a restaurant theme to match everyone’s twisted fantasies.
Cabbages & Condoms
This famous restaurant started as support for the Thai’s PDA, the agency promoting responsible family planning. The goal of the weird theme is to educate people on the proper health and safety benefits of condoms in a fun way. Other than the delicious food served there, Cabbages & Condoms features life sized statues of famous characters made out of colored condoms (see the picture below) and waiters serving you with condoms on their heads. Instead of a breath mint at the end of your meal, they encourage you to take some condoms with you. Their food “is guaranteed not to cause pregnancy.”
Location: Bangkok, Thailand
Ka-Tron Flying Chicken Restaurant
This restaurant tries to correct this problem of boring dinner with the most creative solution they could think of: launching roasted chickens through the air with a catapult onto the spiked helmet of a waiter on a unicycle. That’s the theme. Sometimes the chickens are set on fire before being catapulted. Some of the more experienced unicycling waiters can skewered a chicken with each hand, one on their helmet and one in the spike they hold with their teeth. If you’re lucky, you might get to see one waiter on the other’s shoulders. But either way, your roast chicken dinner is going through the air before it gets to you.
Location: Bangkok, Thailand
The Zzak
The blind dating culture in South Korea is all the rage right now. Naturally, there has to be a place that helps you with your spur of the moment decision to go on a random blind date. At The Zzak in Korea, you and a few friends are given a private booth in a room to order food and drinks. When you’re feeling frisky, you can press some buttons on the wall to indicate that you are looking for potential companions to come join your booth and play drinking games. Then you wait as people walk by your room, peering through the glass door to see if they want to join you. Window shopping for dates.
Location: Seoul, South Korea
Hobbit House
Rumor has it, this restaurant started when a peace corps volunteer and college professor who loved the Lord of the Rings books so much decided to make a Hobbit themed restaurant staffed entirely by little people. It gives new meaning to the term “short-staffed.” The circular door and candle-lit interior is designed to mimic the mythical house in Middle Earth from the books. The dwarf staff is friendly, the beer list is long, and the daily Pinoy acts are entertaining. One bar to rule them all.
Locations: Manila and Boracay, Philippines
Soldaten Kaffee (Nazi Cafe)
This restaurants originally opened its doors 2011 with the name of a Paris cafe that Nazi soldiers frequented during WWII but was quickly forced to shut down due to the quite obviously inappropriate theme: Nazis. It claimed to be “World War II” themed, but come on. In 2014, it reopened after promising to change a lot of the symbols and references to Hitler, but it didn’t. Nonetheless, the cafe is still open in Indonesia, saying that it features memorabilia from both sides and doesn’t glorify anything. 2 wrongs don’t make a reich.
Location: Bandung, Indonesia
Modern Toilet
As the name indicates, this restaurant is themed around bathroom items. Their mascot is a poop emoji, you sit on toilets, drink out of urinal shaped cups and eat curry out of toilet bowls. In true Asian fashion, the chocolate ice cream comes in a squatter toilet. What started out as an ice cream shop putting chocolate ice cream in a toilet shaped bowl to draw more customers has become a full-fledged restaurant with a few locations. I guess you can crap where you eat.
Locations: Taiwan, China, and Hong Kong
Speaking of crap…
Golden Grain Restaurant (金粒餐)
This last restaurants theme is quite disturbing, so disturbing that I couldn’t find any English articles on it and had to translate it from a few Chinese sources. I’m not sure if it’s really a theme, but if I were to call it anything, it would be “Rich People Paying Lots of Money to Eat Virgin Girl Poop with Small Amounts of Gold In It” themed. In an extremely exclusive club in Tokyo, very rich people can pay a ridiculous sum of money to eat the carefully prepared excrement of a virgin teenage girl that they’ve picked out. The girl must be 15 and she could not have had her period within the last 10 days. The club will give her a special diet to strictly adhere to so when the day comes, her waste will be tasty. Somehow there also happens to be small amounts of gold in it. The details on that are fuzzy. Anyone for the PooPoo Platter?
Location: Secret Club in Tokyo, Japan
Okay so truth be told the last one might be a rumor started by Chinese news sources, but still. WTF!
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