A peek into the world’s weirdest restaurants

Bob Blumer has been served beer by a monkey waiter, dined in a nudist pop-up restaurant, and sampled the food at an eatery that serves dogs — no, nothing so cruel as dog meat but a fine-dining establishment that caters exclusively to canines (masters are welcome but not provided for on the menu).

It’s all in a day’s work for Blumer, who braves the weird, the wacky, and sometimes wonderful as host of the new TLC series World’s Weirdest Restaurants, which will premiere in the Philippines on Monday night.

“We shot a total of 52 restaurants — a real spectrum,” Blumer said in a phone interview.  “Some had really amazing food.  Sometimes the environment just overwhelmed everything else and the food was secondary.  And sometimes they were unbelievably weird and sometimes they were more wondrous than weird.”

Going to the dogs: At the Dining Dog Café in the Pacific Northwest, dogs slip into formal wear and can dine on a four-course gourmet meal.

Blumer will taste up to six dishes from every restaurant, including those serving pets (“[The food] was consumable for humans, just fairly bland,” he says.  “I mean, it wasn’t that well spiced because I guess dogs aren’t into hot spices like I am”), even going so far as trying sautéed killer-bee larvae in Japan, but there is a limit to how much he will eat. After all, he gained 10 lbs. after shooting one season.

If there’s a surreal quality to Blumer’s exploits, maybe that’s because Blumer was also host of the Food Network’s Surreal Gourmet and Glutton for Punishment, breaking seven Guinness World Records for the latter show, like making the world’s biggest bowl of salsa.

An artist who’s illustrated his own cookbooks, Blumer can predict how foods and flavors will mix the way an artist can visualize what pigments result when mixing paints. A skilled cook, he also has no problem admitting that he never went to culinary school or had any formal training.

“Over the last 22 years, I’ve spent a lot of time in kitchens,” he says. “I’ll watch and learn a lot of techniques. I’ve also done the same thing in the wine world and taught myself a lot about wine.  And so it’s like I’ve gone to my own self-styled culinary school. At this point of the game, I have all the confidence in the world. I mean, I often do throw-downs with chefs who’ve gone to culinary school and worked in kitchens for a long time, and I very often win.”

Below, Blumer talks about his favorite strange restaurants, his hatred for mushrooms and how the Philippines needs to be weirder if we want to merit a segment on World’s Weirdest Restaurants.

THE PHILIPPINE STAR: What qualifies a restaurant as weird?

BOB BLUMER: Mostly it’s the environment.  Occasionally the food, but it’s really the theme of the restaurant or just the wackiness of the proprietor and what they do. For example, we did one restaurant that served dogs, as in the dogs were the customers. There was this crazy woman who made food for dogs and they all sat at tables and ate it.  And it was really funny because she went to all this trouble to make this fancy food for dogs.  And then she plated it like you’d plate food in a fancy restaurant, (under a) cloche, bring the plate to the table and lift the dome.  And the first time I thought, Oh, well, the dog is going to look at the plate and think about what a beautiful presentation this is, and then start to nibble on something.  But as soon as she would lift the lid, the dog would just hoover down everything in, like, five seconds. It was pretty funny.

What are your favorite weird restaurants?
 

Nursing food and drink: In Taipei, a restaurant serves traditional Taiwanese food that’s so good the resident “nurses” keep checking your blood pressure and prescribing your next drink.

We went to an izakaya just outside of Tokyo where macaque monkeys serve you your beer. I mean, how can you go wrong with beer and monkeys? Right there, they kind of had me. And as it happened, the food in that little izakaya was stunningly delicious.  It was sort of a one- or two-person operation — the husband and wife — and the fish was all super-fresh.  I learned how to make karaage, which is a deep-fried chicken balls, and it was just … it was very, very memorable.

And then there was a pop-up restaurant in New York City where all of the diners were naked.  So that’s a hard one to forget.

As for bad food, there was actually one restaurant that didn’t make the cut because the food was so bad. It was a restaurant also in Tokyo where everything was made with mayonnaise, including the cocktails.  And it wasn’t just a little dab of mayonnaise.  It was, like, a big fat squirt of mayonnaise.  And as it happened, the night that we went there was a big, big storm that was approaching and not a single person came to the restaurant.  So between the bad food and not a single customer, that one just ended up on the cutting room floor.

How do you find these restaurants all over the world?

Well, some of them we found back in our days of traveling, while we were shooting Glutton for Punishment. Obviously there’s a lot of stuff out there on the Web.  In fact, if you Google “weird restaurants” and go to any one of the number of sights that have listed them, between season one and season two, we’ve pretty well been to every single one of them.
 

Have you found any in the Philippines?

We haven’t been to the Philippines yet. What happens is when we travel to places that are far away, we need to find not one or two restaurants but at least four or six, so that we can justify going all the way there. Which isn’t to say that we might not find some, like if I’m not mistaken, there is one restaurant in the Philippines that has servers who are all little people.

Yes, it’s called Hobbit House.

So that’s under our radar, but we need to find a few more before we can commit to coming.

Well, if you had an enemy, which restaurant would you take him to?

That’s a good question. There is a torture restaurant in Lviv, in the Ukraine, where they have all these old torture devices. It’s a bit freaky and spooky, so I would definitely take him there.

And also, we did a place called Dick’s Last Resort in the States, and their whole shtick is that they abuse the customer.  So you walk in and, if you’re a little bit balding, then they’ll start teasing you about the fact that you’re balding. They just yell at you and tease you and give you a hard time the whole night, and they expect a big tip at the end.

On the other end of the spectrum, if you wanted to impress a girl, which restaurant would you take her to?

Well, I could say the clothing-optional one, but that might conjure up the wrong notions. In Tokyo, we did the dog café and the cat café. Tokyo is such a big city with such small apartments that people can’t really keep pets, so if you want to show your sensitive side, you can go to one of these cafés and make nice to a cat or a dog. Actually, this season we also did a bunny restaurant. You get to play with bunnies. Some of the dishes come in bunny shapes, like a bunny head or with bunny ears.

Which country has the most number of weird restaurants and why do you think that is?

Well, that’s a really easy answer.  The answer is Japan, and we’ve been there now for both seasons, and the first time we were there for three weeks, and the second time we were there for two weeks. I think that Japan is, to a certain degree, a repressed society where they’re very formal and proper on the exterior, but obviously any society that’s like that on the exterior has a lot going on inside their minds. I mean, I cannot remember the exact number but there is something like 2,050 maid restaurants, you know, the little French maids. Just that alone, and then all these other crazy, sort of high-concept theme restaurants. There is a fair degree of escapism that is involved in these restaurants where people like to get out of that sort of normal, polite world and go into a fantasy world for a short period of time.

Do you find that these restaurants actually last and flourish or do they tend to shut down after the novelty factor has worn off?

You’d be surprised sometimes.  A lot of the Japanese restaurants that I’ve just referred to, for example, an Arabian-themed restaurant, a butler restaurant, a maid restaurant, an Alcatraz prison restaurant — a lot of them are owned by big companies and they’ve sort of changed theme restaurants.  And then, for example, Modern Toilet, the infamous restaurant in Taiwan where they serve curry out of miniature toilet bowls — you’d think that that might just be a passing fad.  But in fact, it’s a franchise.  Like it’s so popular that there are several of them. Even that restaurant, Dick’s Last Resort, the one where they insult you, is also a franchise in America.

Is there any food that you would never eat?

In the name of making as entertaining a show as possible, I’ll try anything.  I mean, in the first season I tried sautéed killer bee larva. I tried sautéed killer bees. I tried fried crickets. I ate balut when I was in the Philippines once.  I ate the fugu that I prepared and detoxified myself in Osaka.

I hate mushrooms and I really don’t like truffles, though. You can ruin a meal for me by shaving $100 worth of truffles over it.

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Starting Jan. 7, World’s Weirdest Restaurants will premiere every Monday at 9 p.m. on TLC.