How far can you go with themed food?

I have to admit when I first saw this concept I nearly threw up but at the same time was amused and intrigued.  I hadn’t really thought about where the line between fun & bad taste lay with themed food establishments but certainly “Modern Toilet” in Taiwan does challenge that line.

My first assumption was that it would probably be a talking point, maybe a place younger people would go once, but not really expand much beyond that.  Obviously I was wrong, though in my defence, things that work in Taiwan frequently don’t work anywhere else on the planet.

First a little background. Modern Toilet started in 2004 under the name “Marton” and it primarily served ice creams shaped like (well you can probably guess) in toilet bowl shaped plates.  This became so popular that they opened more & more stores, expanded their menu to include savoury dishes, expanded further on the toilet theme and rebranded as “Modern Toilet”.  They now have something like 14 restaurants and have expanded to Hong Kong & China.  They are also expanding in the near future to Macau, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia & further within China.

Their menu itself is not really unusual, its more the way the food is presented, the toilet rolls as napkins & the seats (which are toilets) that creates the imagery.

According to the manager, its designed to shock & confuse the senses and that’s what appeals to the market. Its less that its toilet humor and more about being confrontationalist.

The question then becomes, who goes there?  Having seen a few myself it seems to predominately be younger people, students. However there were also a fair number of families there too – fortunately few with children of toilet training age!!  For the families it was very much about the toilet humor and a good time for their children who could get a month’s worth of potty jokes out of their system in one night.  One mother told me that she brings her family there more for her husband because it gives him a chance to be “one of the boys” with the kids, tell toilet jokes, make Mum go green and all those fun things kids (and husbands) often like to do.

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