Whimsical restaurant
Photo Credit: Eatly

Restaurants I wish Existed

Here is a list of ideas for wild and wacky restaurants that I hope someone will create someday.

Note: If you’re a creator of wacky-concept restaurants, feel free to steal these ideas, just please invite me to the opening!

No Spoons (a.k.a. Soup Flight)
The entire menu always consists of 30 soups (most hot, some cold, most savory, a few sweet, most classic, a few experimental). They are only served in 1.5 ounce shot glasses, which you sip the soup from; no bowls or spoons. Anyone who brings their own spoon is permanently banned from ever coming again for the rest of their lives (after having their photo taken and put up on a special section of the wall). All soups are served with crispy whole wheat garlic crostini, which you’re encouraged to dip.

Classy Party (a.k.a. Rich Uncle)
No menu, fixed price, all you can eat (but you can only stay for 90 minutes, at which point a timer chimes on your table, and the waiters kick you out). The waiters are dressed to the nines in absurdly fancy outfits and walk around with silver trays of delicious-looking small hors d’oeuvres, the best that you’d find at a classy party, as well as trays of fancy drinks. You wave a waiter over whenever you want what they’ve got (as you do with dim sum). Certain special surprising Hors d’oeuvres (for instance, lavender pentagon mini doughnuts sprinkled in gold leaf) are brought out only rarely by the waiters (and only then in small quantities, on special golden trays), so people in the know keep their eyes peeled for these, and feel superior to the rest of the diners whenever they manage to nab something from a gold tray.

Data-Driven Dining (a.k.a. Randomized Controlled Table)
Yet another small bites restaurant. You don’t order from waiters; instead, you order from a tablet embedded in the center of each table, which digitally guides you through the ordering process. Here’s the twist, though: whatever you order comes in a pair. The two items are somewhat different versions of the same general thing. For instance, if you order the potato croquettes, you get two somewhat differently prepared potato croquettes. Once you’ve eaten them both, you tap on the iPad to indicate which of the two you like better, and the server brings you a third (matching the one you preferred). All the click data is recorded for analysis. In this way, each diner is part of a never-ending series of studies. Each day the chef analyzes yesterday’s data and uses it to inform his or her recipes for that day, discarding all the recipes that lost their match-up and preparing novel variations on those that won. The food endlessly iterates and improves.

Alien Sunset (a.k.a. Ylla)
The restaurant is based on an elaborate fictional alien world that has been thought through in tremendous detail (e.g., maybe based loosely on one of the short stories in “The Martian Chronicles”). The restaurant takes itself absurdly seriously, as one of the top restaurants on a faraway planet (that had a different form of intelligent life, with a very different culture). Each waiter is trained in the history and customs of this alien’s world and made to look alien. The waiters lead you through certain alien rituals at the table. The cutlery does not look familiar to humans. Each menu item references that alien world and a glossary and appendix in the back of the menu fleshes out the backstory and context. Alien items adorn the walls and fill display cases, for instance, the (fake) heads of surreal creatures. You can inspect these items at your leisure. You’re never really quite sure what the food is that you order, but it’s delicious. The toilets in the bathroom are unrecognizable and hard to figure out how to use. The odd lighting and bizarre architecture make it truly not feel like earth. Staff is told to never, ever, to break the fourth wall or reference anything on earth. Upon entering the restaurant, you have to choose something to wear (from a set of options) to make you too look and feel alien. The restaurant has large windows on all four sides and, out of each of them, you can see beautiful alien landscapes (it’s always sunset).

The King Is Mad (a.k.a. Follow the Rabbit)
At first, it seems like any other modestly elegant (but clearly traditional to the point of being stodgy) old restaurant. But then, when you inspect the menu, you realize that each menu item references ambiguous non-food “things” that the food is paired with. For instance, “Mushroom soufflé served with mysterious box” or “Napoleon Pastry, with Imperial Regalia” or “High tea platter with scones, tea sandwiches, and orange rhymes” or “Steaming spaghetti served on your lap” or “Tomato soup served with your choice of an impossibly large or impossibly small spoon” or “Flourless chocolate cake served to everyone but you.” or “Brussel sprouts in the dark.” Each item that you order involves some experience occurring, or something changing in the restaurant, or some object being presented to you, or something unexpected occurring during the delivery of the food.

Saucy (a.k.a. Fifths)
All the food is served in five thin slices (kept apart with thin separators), with each slice having a different sauce (which you pick from an insanely large number of sauce options). For instance, you could get the tofu steak (simultaneously) with sweet and sour sauce, Sriracha, Szechuan sauce, black pepper sauce, and mushroom miso sauce.

Mindful Eating (a.k.a. Presence)
Prix fixe menu only. Your meal is served in a special wooden mechanical box containing 25 small sealed compartments. The compartments are on a timer system, with one new compartment opening exactly every 3 minutes (so the entire meal takes 75 minutes). Each compartment contains just a few bites of food and comes with a one-sentence message attached (that you can only read once it opens) telling you what to focus on, do or notice while taking those bites. For instance, one message might tell you to notice the subtle hints of wasabi, another might suggest that you eat the next bite recalling a fond childhood memory, another might ask you to deeply inhale the scent before eating, and yet another might instruct you to pay close attention to the way the next bite will crunch in your mouth with the texture (but not taste) of potato chips. Each item has strong similarities with the last item but an obvious difference as well (e.g., one small scoop of sweet potato salad followed by one juicy sweet potato dumpling followed by one juicy mushroom dumpling followed by a tiny mushroom soup), so that through a progression of similar items you end up eating a wide variety of different things.

The Fruit Organ (a.k.a. Sweet Melody)
A small storefront, mainly occupied by a giant musical device that looks like an organ. But the device is hooked up to a dozen or so ever-rotating spheres of fruit juice/pulp (freshly blended that morning). Different chords on the organ are set to release different juices (down through tubes). You order the fruit smoothie you want by placing your plastic cup beneath where the tubing comes together and then asking for a specific song (that is known to produce that combination of fruits that you want), which the organist then plays for you (automatically preparing your drink as well as calculating the total that you owe). You can also go “off-menu” and order any famous song you like, which will create a unique random blend, replicable in the future if you like.

Talk (a.k.a. Strangers Dining)
You’re encouraged to go alone (though bringing one friend is allowed). You’re seated at a circular table for five people (i.e., with four strangers), which is small enough so that the whole table can easily talk together, and you have a meal together. All the tables at the restaurant seat 5, and you’re seated as soon as four other strangers arrive (or, with however many other strangers have arrived after 15 minutes as long as it’s at least one other person). The food is all served family-style (i.e., dishes are all to share). Each dish comes with a thought-provoking, deep, or provocative question written on the platter, which each person is encouraged to answer. A shortlist of rules at each table bans questions like “where are you from” and “where do you work” and comments on the weather. Instead, it suggests replacements like “where have you always wanted to live for a month?” and “what are you passionate about?” and comments regarding what you noticed about the other person.

Everything Fusion (a.k.a. Eat Everywhere)
The names of every country in the world (or, to be more practical, the 30 countries whose cuisines are most popular) are written on wooden balls or ping pong balls, one ball per country. The balls are placed into one of those “lottery draw” devices that makes it easy to draw them at random. Each month, the device is used to draw two random balls (that is, two random countries), ideally on a special night that is pre-announced so that people who happen to be dining at the restaurant that night (or who want to come for it) can witness the drawing. Then the head chef invents a dish that is a fusion of those two country’s cuisines (or, the recipe is crowdsourced from a submission section of the website, with the winning recipe chosen by the head chef and the winning submitter getting a free meal for two people). That new fusion dish is added to the menu, and another prior fusion (selected by the head chef) is removed from the menu. Even if “only” 30 countries are used, that’s still 435 possible fusions!

No Tables (a.k.a. The Angry Diner)
The menu has two hundred items on it, crammed way too close together, with unnecessary color splotches all over the place, in addition to pictures of random people (you have no idea who they are). It is open at odd hours and not open some days for no apparent reason. It only has a few tables. You can’t take a picture of the menu, ask if an item is vegetarian, bring more children than adults, order too little, order too much, come in a group of more than four people, ask for recommendations, or take too long to order, or the staff will promptly and ruthlessly throw you out. The menu items are confusing as hell (e.g., Macaroni and cheese pancakes with hot sauce? Slutty cakes? Zorros: cinnamon waffle potato? “Love buns” in 6 possible flavors, including cauliflower mango flavor). You are too afraid to ask questions about any of the items, though. The waiter sometimes refuses to give you what you ordered on the grounds that he has “never heard of it before” or because he thinks “it sounds gross.” Sometimes he’ll just stare at you as though you haven’t actually made your order until you panic and change it. [Note: this restaurant already exists in Manhattan; comment if you live in NYC and want its real name.]


  

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *