Wrong order, right smiles: Japan’s ‘wrong order restaurant’ raises awareness with a twist

There is a restaurant in Tokyo where customers are content to receive poor service. You ask for dumplings and they give you miso soup. You order grilled fish and possibly sushi.

It’s not uncommon for waiters and waitresses to mix things up, bring out the wrong food, misinterpret what a customer orders, or drink the glass of water they were supposed to bring to another table. So you are thirsty for a while.

This type of behavior results in these employees being hired rather than fired. Is this a piece of performance art? No, it’s mainly in Kyoto, and all the waiters and waitresses suffer from dementia. It is not a defect. It’s a feature. It is the main requirement for the position.

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Wrong-order restaurant in Japan operates on a unique model

All this happens in the Wrong Orders Restaurant. It was planned as a regular pop-up, held numerous times over several days, to raise public awareness of dementia.

The subtle surprise of unintentional human error has become, in a way, the genuine product of the restaurant: rather than the desired food itself. Much of the laughter in the restaurant comes from the pleasant surprise of seeing what, amazingly, you are served. Sometimes you can even drink your coffee through a straw.

Shiro Oguni, a Japanese television director, founded this company to influence people’s perspectives on aging and gradual cognitive decline. Dementia is a broad term that refers to a decline in memory, learning, and communication abilities. It is caused by a variety of diseases, one of which is Alzheimer’s, a specific disease.

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The inaugural event was held in 2017 and has been repeated regularly ever since. It took about $115,000 in crowdfunding to get started, but it’s not hard to imagine a lucrative, everyday restaurant based on Oguni’s goal.

He got the idea for his company after being offered a dumpling instead of a hamburger while visiting a nursing home. He was about to return the dumpling when he realized he was in a new universe with varying levels of functionality and bugs that didn’t really hurt him.

Why not simply accept what he received as a mark of respect for the problems everyone around him was experiencing, as an act of kindness and humility?

The restaurant has been built with crowdfunding

The wrong order restaurant in Japan www.wrong orders.com

Oguni has tried to make it easy for others to emulate the program by making it easy to share what your organization has learned. His mobile party has spawned projects in South Korea and Australia.

It required initial crowdfunding as it requires extensive planning and collaboration from various sectors, including catering professionals, interior designers, social welfare oversight and the cooperation of organizations currently helping people with dementia.

The initiative is fantastic because it portrays people with dementia as happy, hard-working, helpful, communicative and kind. Everyone has a good time in the videos created to document the project.

In their basic, cheerful attire, older employees appear as engaged and productive as anyone a third their age. Instead of viewing dementia as scary, dreary, and isolated, diners describe the experience as adorable, joyful, hilarious, sociable, and comfortable.

Japanese restaurantwww.wrong orders.com

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During one of the initial pop-ups, 37% of orders were incorrect, but 99 percent of consumers said they were satisfied with their dinner. At one event, one of the waiters sat down with his customers without thinking.

Another diner requested that one of the diners take orders from the others at the table. No one who came to eat was bothered by any of this. They know what awaits them: empathetic and improvised cabaret humor.

Oguni has stated that his initiative is about more than just being more tolerant and accepting of people with dementia; he is trying to show how people can be compassionate to each other, regardless of their flaws.

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Source: vtt.edu.vn

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