‘The Restaurant of Order Mistakes’

might seem a strange way to promote the service in a restaurant,

but there is a reason for the name, on Friday last week, a curious restaurant popped up in Tokyo’s Toyosu district, it was called “The Restaurant of Order Mistakes” (注文をまちがえる料理店), a twist on The Restaurant of Many Orders, Kenji Miyazawa’s 1924 tale, but why this name for a restaurant? Because this pop-up restaurant had an inclusively-driven mission, and had hired waiters with dementia and Alzheimer’s, the premise of the pop-up restaurant, which was in a trial period from June 2 – June 4, 2017, was that the staff who have dementia may get your order wrong, but if you go in knowing that, it hopefully changes your perception about those who suffer from the brain disease and it makes you realise that with a little bit of understanding on our part dementia patients can be functioning members of society,

Mizuho Kudo, who attended the event and tweeted about her experience, wrote that they went in and ordered the hamburg but got gyoza dumplings instead, which was really funny, She also noted that the younger waiters were full of smiles and seemed to be having a lot of fun, the restaurant was the brainchild of several like-minded folks including Maggie’s Tokyo, the Japanese reincarnation of U.K.-based Maggie’s Centres, and Maggie’s Tokyo is also where the pop-up restaurant was hosted, the short trial period has now ended but organisers are currently planning for another pop-up event in September to coincide with World Alzheimer’s Day (September 21st) as an aside many years ago at Kingfisheries we employed a young chap who had a brain tumour removed and as a side effect had little memory of current events, but could remember things from years ago, we explained to regular customers that agreed to be served by him what was happening, so there was a steady stream of people going outside to look at their purchases, then walking back inside wanting to exchange the tropical saltwater reef fish for the goldfish they actually wanted! but for him as a fish-keeper he was so happy to be able to do something that he enjoyed.