What Is The Deal With Naked Dining Pop-Up Restaurants?

This year has been filled with strange and crazy happenings. Whether it’s the rainbow food trend (yes, we can’t stop talking about either) or if it’s Donald Trump running for election, 2016 has a whole bunch of crazy things happening and sometimes it’s great and sometimes you want to pause the year and just ask ‘what the hell?’.

Nude Dining comes into the second category.

A London company announced earlier this year that they were going to be having a nude pop-up restaurant for three months. The moment the announcement and booking went up, they were already fully booked up. All of London wanted to experience this and everyone wanted a piece of the newest pie. Dining at The Bunyadi costs £69 and fits 42 people at a time, and they’ve got almost 46,000 people on the waitlist! The concept is that everything is naked and bare and minimum, so the food isn’t deep fried or cooked on a stove, it’s made using raw and organic ingredients and prepared in a ‘natural’ method. There’s no electricity (hello, candle light) and diners aren’t allowed to take their phones inside.

And to make you feel a little more comfortable, you can choose to keep the bathrobe that they give you on, or strip down to nothing and dine with the other patrons. Plus, the wait staff are naked, except for a leafy thong.

*All this information comes from personal accounts of journalists who had the opportunity to visit the restaurant.

Why we think it’s weird

Besides the fact that you’re sitting in a room with a bunch of random strangers and in your birthday suit, you mean? It seems unsanitary too. All that exposed skin and body parts, it doesn’t seem like the best thing in the world, right? Sure, the food might be great and you might want to be part of the latest trend, but there is something about this that makes us uncomfortable.

And that’s not all. In July of this year, a nude pop-up restaurant will kick off in Tokyo, Japan. And this restaurant comes with a whole set of rules and restrictions that make us dislike this concept even more. According to a report by RocketNews, “those outside the 18 – 60 year-old age bracket; and those who are 15 kilograms (33 pounds) over “average body weight”. To clarify this point, entrance guidelines stipulate that weight is measured in correspondence to a person’s height, suggesting that Body Mass Index (BMI) calculations may be used to determine access. Diners who don’t appear to be within the desired weight range upon arrival will be weighed at the door and if they are found to be overweight, they will be denied access with no refunds.”

What is the point of having a restaurant like this if not everyone can show up? And worse, you spend all that money on trying to get a spot at the restaurant and they turn you away without a refund because you’re not skinny enough. There’s more: patrons also can’t be sporting any tattoos and have to wear paper underwear for the duration of their meal and the servers will be scantily clad men.

Unlike the rainbow food trend, we think that this might be taking freedom and liberation to a whole new level. We’re ready for this trend to end, if it’s even a trend at all.