Universals, Revisited -- Theme Restaurants

So it was only about a week ago that I claimed that I had discovered the number one universal among us all: people love dogs. I still maintain that this is absolutely true, but I’ve also had a recent epiphany that rivals man’s best friend…theme restaurants.

It is universal that theme or gimmick restaurants are a bad idea*, from America’s finest examples, such as Rainforest Café or any number of diners on Rockville Pike, all the way to Hong Kong, as illustrated in the following two examples I’d like to share with you now…

Example 1: The Jumbo Floating Failure

Located in Aberdeen, a fishing village on Hong Kong Island where many people still live in sampans (flat-bottomed, wooden boats), the Jumbo Kingdom Floating Restaurant is one of the top tourist attractions in HK…it’s monstrous, a little tacky, requires a unique mode of transportation to reach, and it’s expensive – so it’s got all the required elements. Even though we knew it would be less than amazing, it was an experience we had to have – you don’t come to Hong Kong and not eat at the Jumbo Floating Restaurant.

We took a quick sampan water-taxi ride out to the cruise-ship-esque restaurant, and as we settled in with our menus, we quickly realized that we had severely underestimated the cost of the JFR. We could hardly afford the menu and we were stuck out at “sea”…which left us with very few options. So after nearly 30 minutes of debate over dishes and calculations of prices and cost per head, the 11 of us collectively selected 7 dishes.

As the dishes came out one by one, we all patiently waited as the plate was passed from person to person, each of us taking one piece of chicken, one piece of broccoli, one scoop of rice, one piece of pineapple, and lovingly tending to it and savoring it until the next dish arrived. You could feel the anxiety-level creeping up as one dish would move around the table, and still waiting your turn, realize that only the lame piece of bok choy or the reject shrimp would be left for you to eat. We became an interesting mix of polite and confrontational with each other… “Oh no, Melinda, go ahead, have that half of a carrot left on the plate.”; “Kevin, you are supposed to pass counterclockwise!”; “Dominic, you are hogging the sauce!”; “Yeah, Irma, you can chew on my bones, I was done with them.”

After paying the bill, we barely had enough money to get ourselves back to North Point, and we all crawled into bed hungry.

Example 2: Pirates Should Have Been our First Clue

While on a boba-quest in the middle of June, we stumbled upon Satay King and knew in an instant that we had to eat there before leaving Hong Kong. Satay King is a huge, fantastically tacky pirate-themed restaurant, complete with no less than 15 pirate mannequins hanging from ropes and dangling from rafters, tables shaped like small pirate boats, and twinkling Christmas lights and decorative parrots everywhere. It was like Muppet Treasure Island meets Pirates of the Carribean in Hong Kong…who wouldn’t want to get lost in that fantasy world?

We returned to Satay King to have dinner during our last week in Hong Kong. The service was slow, the food didn’t come out in the right order, dishes were forgotten in the kitchen, my iced tea had what resembled a breast implant floating in the bottom of it, the complimentary fish-dumpling dessert (yes, you read correctly) looked like genitalia and tasted like mashed potatoes and coconut, and my Satay dinner was essentially strips of undercooked bacon with spaghetti in peanut soup. Waiting for the bill to come, we all started to feel a little queasy, and it sure wasn’t seasickness. At least we got some spectacular photos out of the evening.

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*The exception is Disney – everything Disney does is magic.