Taiwanese ‘Toilet’ restaurant flush with success
For years now I’ve had the idea for a great restaurant that I wanted to call WC, where all the chairs were actually toilets that patrons sat on (working, available for business WHILE you ate), the bar was supported by urinals, and the whole place was covered in white bathroom tile with a handy drain in the middle. In fact, the bar would be named Urinal, so it’s tagline could be, Step Up to the Urinal. And when the hostes showed you to your table, she could say, “Please take a seat.” Entertainment would feature live “scat singing” accompanied by the gentle murmur of many simultaneously flushing toilets. And appetizers could be called “Stool Samples.” Well, you get the point.
I thought such a restaurant would be outrageous, impossible to find backers for, but once it opened it would be a huge hit, the crowds to get in so great that the newspapers would have to report, “WC backed up and overflowing.”
Such are my idle fantasies. But surely this is one that would never be realized. I was just some sicko with an idea that nobody else on the planet could ever imagine. Wrong again. Check out Marton Theme Restaurant in Taiwan:
Its unusual theme is proving a draw for customers eager to eat food off of plates and bowls shaped like western toilet seats as well as Japanese “squat toilets.”
Marton Theme Restaurant, named after the Chinese word “matong” for toilet, has become a hit in Taiwan’s second largest city since its opening in May 2004.
Though bathroom decor seems a bizarre way to whet the appetites of diners, the idea has been so successful owner Eric Wang opened a second and bigger branch just seven months later.
Not only that, but the food is made to look like the stuff that gets deposited in traditional toilets, an idea too sick for even me to think of:
“We not only sell food but also laughter. The food is just as good as any restaurant but we offer additional fun,” says 26-year-old Wang, who gave up a career in banking to launch the business.
“Most customers think the more disgusting and exaggerated (the restaurant is), the funnier the dining experience is,” he says.
The top orders are curry hot pot, curry chicken rice and chocolate ice cream because, well, “they look most like the real thing,” Wang says.
And the rest of the decor?
Customers, however, flock to Marton Theme Restaurant mainly for its quirky dining wares and interior decor.
“This is such a funny and strange restaurant,” says patron Chen Bi-fang while sitting atop a colorful toilet seat — the standard chair at the restaurant.
She sits by a table converted from a bathtub with a glass cover while looking at a wall decorated with neon-lit faucets and urinals turned into lamps.
Where did Mr. Wang get this great idea, if not by rigging up my microwave oven to tap into my brain’s alpha wavestream? From the same place all great ideas come from, of course: a Japanese comic book!
To make sure his investment wouldn’t go down the pan, Wang first tested the water for the toilet food gimmick by peddling ice cream in toilet-shaped cones in street booths four months before opening his restaurant. It was an instant hit …. His idea came from a popular Japanese comic featuring a robot doll fond of eating excrement in ice cream cones.
Ah, to be a young Japanese robot doll again, without a care in the world. Those were the good old days. And now I have to just flush another great idea down the crapper, now that somebody else has plunged right in and beaten me to it.
