Restaurant of mistaken orders
There is a pop-up restaurant in Tokyo that only employs servers with dementia. It’s called Restaurant of Mistaken Orders and Shiro Oguni created it because he wanted to raise awareness and give purpose to a group of people who are often relegated to locked wards and mockery.
You agree to eat at the restaurant knowing that things probably aren’t going to run smoothly–37% of the orders are delivered wrong but nearly every customer leaves with a smile on their face.
I love this concept. Not only because my darling nan has dementia and would love this kind of opportunity, but also because it encourages people to see another human and another experience without expecting their own version of perfection.
The research tells us that humans are more likely to jump online to leave a negative review than they are a positive one but what happens when we walk into a situation with a different expectation? One that doesn’t involve a pursuit of perfection? One where we’re forced to let go of our preconceived ideas of how something should play out?
I grew up being encouraged to pursue perfection. Both at school and at home. Private schools expect perfection–they need you to perform so they can continue to charge exorbitant prices for an education that “guarantees” results (that means either getting into medicine or law or if all else fails, mixing in circles to ensure you bag yourself a doctor or a lawyer). Failure or getting things wrong was never encouraged. At school, a flaw or a mistake was seen as a weakness.
A pursuit of perfection is a curse. It has been my curse because perfection is near impossible so an assumption that what I do will fall short of what is considered perfect has always been my default. Even before I was kissing boys and having sex I was practicing with pillows because I didn’t want to seem like I didn’t know what I was doing. Back then, I thought sex was meant to be a perfectly written poem, not a messy first draft of something that would forever be a work in progress.
But that’s exactly what sex and intimacy are. You won’t ever have perfection but you shouldn’t want it either. What does perfect sex even mean? I wouldn’t have a clue where to start.
And it’s not about settling for something mediocre or boring; the point of it is to open your eyes to something different, to remove the layers of learned behaviours and expectations that we don’t even realise we’ve collected. To be open to trying something different.
The diners at the Restaurant of Mistaken orders might not get what they ordered but maybe they get a superb dish with the hero of it an ingredient they would never have chosen to order in the first place.
Maybe being open to a serving of Natto is the kind of “fuck that was good” experience you never knew you needed.
(And yes, I had to Google it too.)
