Moscow’s Crazy Toilet Cafe features seats made from lavatories and cocktails served in mini urinals.
Eating and defecation: two parts of life most people like to keep well segregated. Not so the owners of a new Moscow cafe, where both the interiors and the food are toilet themed.
Crazy Toilet Cafe opened on Friday in the Russian capital, and will allow patrons to eat an array of dishes that can only be described as faecal-inspired, served in toilet-themed crockery. Instead of seats, there are about 50 real toilets for guests to sit on while eating.
Located on Arbat Street, a touristy, pedestrianised thoroughfare lined with portrait artists, buskers and hustlers, the restaurant admits it will probably mainly draw one-time novelty visitors rather than repeat clients.
“We think people will walk past, think ‘What on Earth is that?’ and then come in to check it out,” said general manager Inga Yaroslavskaya. “It’s not everywhere you can eat good food from a toilet bowl and drink from a urinal at very reasonable prices.”
The restaurant’s Crazy Lunch menu costs 500 roubles (£5) and features three dubious courses each with a lavatorial theme: a brown and creamy mushroom soup served in a toilet bowl, followed by a swirled sausage served with three piles of steaming mashed potato. If visitors have not lost their appetite by this point, they can finish it off with a bowl of whipped chocolate ice cream.
There is no escaping the toilet theme on the drinks menu either.
“We have a great range of hot cocktails served in mini urinals,” said Yaroslavskaya. Even boring old green tea came served in a tiny toilet bowl, in which it took on a disturbing yellowish hue.
The walls are decorated with faeces-themed cartoons, but guests who need to use the toilet for real must use one of the three cubicles at the back of the restaurant. The toilet bowls used as restaurant seating have been sealed shut to prevent any over-excitable patrons taking things a bit too far.
It isn’t, however, the first toilet-themed restaurant in the world: there is a whole chain of loo-themed Modern Toilet cafes in Taiwan, but Yaroslavskaya believes Crazy Toilet Cafe is the first in Europe.
The cafe’s owner is Alexander Donskoi, formerly mayor of the northern Russian city of Arkhangelsk. After announcing a rather implausible presidential run in 2007, he was promptly arrested and given a three-year suspended sentence. After spending eight months in jail, he was released and opened the G-spot sex museum in Moscow. Now, he has moved on from sex to toilets.
Asked whether the cafe was aimed at genuine coprophiliacs as well as those with merely a morbid curiosity, Yaroslavskaya said the doors are open to all who behave in a civilized manner.
“It’s hard to identify them just by looking at them, so of course they are welcome if they behave normally. We opened a strange restaurant, so it’s natural that some strange people might want to come.”