The Restaurant Of Mistaken Orders

In Tokyo, there is a restaurant where customers are happy to get bad service. You ask for dumplings, and you get miso soup. Whoops. You order grilled fish, and maybe you get sushi. Wait a minute. What? It’s a regular thing for the waiters and waitresses to mix things up, bring the wrong meal, misunderstand what a customer requests, or actually drink the glass of water they were meant to deliver to some table. So, you go thirsty for a bit. This sort of thing gets these workers hired, not fired. Is this performance art? No, it’s mostly in Kyoto, and these waiters and waitresses all have dementia. It isn’t a flaw. It’s the feature. It’s the primary qualification for the job.

All this happens at the Restaurant of Mistaken Orders. It has been organized as a recurring pop-up, held a number of times over several days, to broaden the public’s awareness of dementia. The gentle surprise of the inadvertent human mistakes has become, in a way, the actual product of the restaurant—more than the desired meal itself. Much of the laughter that fills the eatery arises from the pleasant shock of seeing what you are actually, unexpectedly being served. Sometimes you might even get your coffee with a straw.