In Taiwan, A Toilet Too Far

Travel Blog  •  Julia Ross  •  02.26.09 | 10:57 AM ET

Photo by lookslikeamy via Flickr (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en).

My great affection for the Taiwanese notwithstanding, sometimes I’m just plain baffled by the trends that take hold on the island. Case in point: toilet-themed restaurants. Yes, a chain called Modern Toilet now has nine outposts in Taiwan, and is apparently a hit among teens and college students. GlobalPost describes the fad this way:

“Here, customers sit on toilets and eat on covered washbasins. The most popular dishes are chocolate ice cream or curry chicken, served in a mini-toilet. Why? ‘It looks like poo-poo,’ explained Jary Wei, assistant manager at the chain’s Taipei branch. ‘The customers think it’s funny.’”

Charming.

Airplane, prison and hospital-themed restaurants have also caught on in Taiwan—more evidence that the island takes its cultural cues from Japan, which pioneered the trend—but, really, toilets?

In defense of Taiwanese college students, I’ll just say that I advised a number of them while I was living on the island and found them to be exceedingly bright and cosmopolitan. Then again, they’re under a lot of academic pressure, so maybe a visit to Modern Toilet yields some, uh, relief.

Tags: Food, Tres Loco, Asia, Taiwan, Shrinking Planet

Julia Ross is a Washington, DC-based writer and frequent contributor to World Hum. She has lived in China and Taiwan, where she was a Fulbright scholar and Mandarin student. Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Time, Christian Science Monitor, Plenty and other publications. Her essay, Six Degrees of Vietnam, was shortlisted for "The Best American Travel Writing 2009."


2 Comments for In Taiwan, A Toilet Too Far

Joey Liu 02.27.09 | 2:24 AM ET

You forgot to mention the Nazi-themed restaurant where patrons ate in little jail cells with concentration camp photos all over. But they closed that down a few years ago.

ML 03.03.09 | 5:12 PM ET

This is not just Taiwan imitating Japan, similar weird-themed restaurants are in Mainland China as well.  Competition is tough, so any niche helps!

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