Cosplay restaurant
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Cosplay restaurants (コスプレ系飲食店), are theme restaurants and pubs that originated in Akihabara, Tokyo, Japan around the year 2000. They include maid cafés (メイドカフェ) and butler cafés, where the service staff dress as elegant maids, or as butlers. Such restaurants and cafés have quickly become a staple of Japanese otaku culture. Compared with service at normal cafés, the service at cosplay cafés involves the creation of a rather different atmosphere. The staff treat the customers as masters and mistresses in a private home rather than merely as café customers.
The popularity of the Cosplay restaurants and maid cafes has spread to other regions in Japan, such as Osaka's Den Den Town as well as other countries, such as South Korea, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and Canada.
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[edit] Maid cafe
[edit] Meido
The maids are often dressed in a combination of Lolita fashion and french maid-styled uniforms in attempt to look "moe". They also behave in a "cute" and "moe" manner. Sometimes, the maid outfit is augmented with cat or bunny ears. At maid cafes, most service staff members are female, and male jobs are typically limited to bar-backing and janitorial duties.
Some homepages of maid cafés offer pictures and profiles of the maids.
[edit] Service
When a customer enters the café, the maids typically give an extraordinarily humble greeting, such as "Welcome home, Master"(お帰りなさいませ、ご主人様!) in order to play the role of a house servant. In order to enhance the illusion that the customer is indeed the master, they often serve the customer in a very deferential fashion. For example, staff sometimes kneel to mix sugar or milk in teas or other drinks. The purpose of the maid cafés and their service is to make customers feel as though they are at home and to encourage them to relax. Although exemplary customer service is typical of Japan, maid cafés take special care to pamper patrons.
[edit] Butler cafe
While most cosplay restaurants and maid cafes cater to men, there is also a type for women called the butler cafe. The butlers in these cafes are well-dressed and may wear either a typical waiter's uniform or even a tuxedo or tails. Some of the butlers are actually not men but women, who dress in male clothing.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- Meido cafes
- @Home Cafe
- Cafe Doll Tokyo
- Cafe Mai:lish
- MerryHeart cafe&bar
- Mia Cafe
- Pash Cafe NAGOMI
- Maid-san
- Amu Amu (Seoul, South Korea)
- Akiba (Bangkok, Thailand)
- i maid café (Ontario, Canada)
- Cosafe (Singapore)
- Butler cafes
