Prison restaurant...

Another restaurant on the unusual list is the prison themed restaurant. Alcatraz is a prison themed restaurant based in Tokyo, Japan. In this restaurant, as the customers come in, they are handcuffed and taken to their prison cells for their dining experience! The cells are dark and equipped with low tables and chairs, which look like they are very uncomfortable to sit on, and you might leave the restaurant with a backache! The waiters are dressed in black and white striped clothes to resemble the inmates in real prisons. Once you are in your cell, you are locked in there till you finish with your dinner. If you want the waiter to get something for you, customers have to bang cups on the prison cell bars to get his attention, which I cant imagine would be easy. Their menu consists of dishes such as “Adultery Dish”, “Incest Salad” and cocktails named “Lethal Injection.” I don’t understand how anyone would enjoy eating in a place like this, but I guess it depends on people’s personalities and interests. In my opinion this type of restaurant is a very depressing place to go out with friends and family to enjoy a meal together. All the banging of cups on the prison cells to get waiters attention would get too noisy and annoying after a while, and I am sure it wont be noise from just your cell that you have hear. Some people say this restaurant was developed to show people the brutal side of prison life so they would steer away from committing crimes and ending up in jail for real, however I think there are much better ways to stop people committing crimes and getting the message this restaurant is supposedly doing. 

-5 Celsius?

Heard of ice bars? There is one in London and many other countries, however this section of my blog is about ice themed restaurants! This particular restaurant is the first ice lounge in the middle east opened in June 2007 in Dubai and is named as "Chill Out". As you may know, Dubai is one of the hottest countries with a constant temperature of 40 Celsius during the day and this is why it is hard to believe that they have a temperature of-5 Celsius inside the restaurant! Most of the restaurant is made out of ice including the chairs, tables, plates and glasses! The chairs or covered with sheep skin rugs for the customers warmth and comfort. You get to sit on ice chairs and eat your food off ice tables on ice plates using ice cutlery whilst having your drink in ice glasses! This ice restaurant only hold up to 45 people to make sure the body heat do not damage the ice blocks.

The restaurant has three areas which include the lobby and the dining areas, these areas are separated by a "buffer zone". As the customers arrive they are greeted in the lobby and given thermal wear to prepare them for the cold temperatures which include a hooded jacket, gloves and a pair of shoes. Guests spend some time in the buffer zone which has a temperature of around 5 Celsius to prepare them for the minus conditions in the dining areas. This is advised as the temperature drop from 40 Celsius to-5 Celsius all of a sudden can be a shock to the body! There is a choice of hot or cold food and beverages to order from or you can get your drinks from the bar which is also made out of ice! However, this restaurant is non-alcoholic to respect the muslim culture.  is The restaurant is decorated with ice sculptures and even the chandeliers are made out of ice blocks! 

The lighting in this restaurant are all LED lights which do not produce much heat at all which is ideal for all the ice not to melt! They also change colour every few minutes to set different moods. It cost around 9 million Dirhams to put this restaurant together and all the ice work was completed in Canada by "Iceculture Inc" which was then shipped to Dubai and took around a year and a half to complete the entire restaurant! This would be an amazing experience that I would definitely try out if I had the chance, however I don't know if I would enjoy a drink such as a hot chocolate that would go cold in minutes! It would also be a bit of a challenge to get comfortable with a heavy jacket on me and I would think there would be some difficulty in holding a drink or using cutlery with such thick gloves on!

Hospital themed restaurant....

The next unusual restaurant I research into was the hospital themed restaurants. These type of restaurants have waitresses dress up as nurses in short uniforms and the tables are in the shape of hospital beds or operating tables. The food and drinks are brought to your table on hospital trolleys. The drinks are served in test tubes or syringes depending on the drink you order. There are two main hospital themed restaurants that I looked in to, one of them is in Latvia and the other is in Taipei which is known to be a city full of different themed restaurants. The restaurant is said to look like a "medicine cabinet" and the experience of it is for you to be treated as a patient through out your dinner. The restaurants are designed and decorated as hospitals with X-rays hanging up on the walls as oppose to the normal photo frames you would find in a usual restaurant whilst the toilets been labelled as the "emergency room". This type of experience would be ideal if you are in to gory things. This type of hospital restaurants are mainly visited by the male customers due to the pretty "nurses" in short uniforms looking after the customers as their patients. In my opinion it would be a weirdly unusual way of dining that you should try at least once in your life for the experience, unless you have bad memories involving hospitals in which case this type of dining associated with illness and death would be torture!

Dining in the dark

It’s fair to say the hospitality industry has grown in weird and wonderful directions in the past few years. A part of it has been the different types of unusual restaurants that have opened up around the world. I have been researching into these unique restaurants and will be sharing a bit about them on my blog.

The first unusual experience is the trend about dining in the dark. The dining in the dark movement started in France 1993 at a demonstration. This event was about blind and visually disabled people guiding sighted individuals in how to interact using their other senses and in this environment the blind people were the experts at it. This is what led to restaurants opening up with the same concept in mind. This was a positive move towards the visually disabled community as it improved their social positions. This also helped the sighted community to understand and see life in the blind people’s perception. Most restaurants that follow this idea have staff that are blind or visually impaired which shows off the wide range of skills and their capabilities in that certain environment to the sighted individuals. This idea also shows the opportunities available to the visually impaired people and it also improves their self-confidence. The whole idea started off in France but has now moved across the globe including Germany, Italy and America. Opaque is one of the many “dining in the dark” restaurants based in Los Angeles. They also have two other branches in San Francisco and New York. As you arrive in these types of restaurants you are asked to pick your dishes which usually come in a set menu. This is done before you are seated at your table which is the opposite of what you would get at a normal restaurant. The idea of this is so that after you have picked your dishes, you are no longer allowed to use your sight as one of your senses for the rest of your dining experience. Therefore all your other senses such as hearing, smell, touch and taste are heightened because of this. This whole experience could make the diners nervous at first but it is a complete new experience which some people would enjoy.