It is said eating is an art, but you haven’t experienced its highlights until you have tried at least one of these strange restaurants, where food combines with violence, crime, sex, hunting, books, natural phenomena, film and other artistic or crazy features.
Let’s see how you like to feed your belly best!
1. Fortezza Medicea top-security prison, Volterra, Italy
Prison turned into restaurant. Photo by quirkyguide.com
Guests go through security, their phones and bags are confiscated, their bodies checked, their mental healthiness tested, and only after they are allowed to sit and eat their dinners using plastic cutlery. Although a top-security prison, the white wine, Fattoria Sorbaiano, keeps flowing in the Fortezza Medicea, which used to be a castle in Italy.
Surrounded by villas, in the picturesque scenery of Tuscany, the inmates at the jail have swapped their “striped pyjamas” for shirts and ties to cook and wait an extraordinary dinner for those eager to taste the prison life.
Waiters at Fortezza Medicea in Italy. Photo courtesy to Reuters.
It happens only several nights a year, being part of a project to raise money for charities, as well as to teach cooking and waiting skills to the prisoners. Since 2006, guests can reserve a table for a meal priced at 35 euros per person, through a local tourism agency according to Reuters.
Ever head some food-prison fantasies? That’s the place to turn them into reality.
2. El Diablo, Lanzarote, Spain
Cooking food on a volcano!? Madness you’d say, but this restaurant uses a grill over an active volcano, which erupted in 1824, to cook food. For you!
Opened on March 20, 1969, the restaurant was built in the national park where the highest temperatures are registered: the Mountain of Hilario. It takes advantage of the geothermal energy and its circular is a fantastic viewpoint overlooking the volcanic landscape of the Mountains of Fire.
3. Cabbages and Condoms Restaurant, Thailand
At the end of your dinner, you won’t receive some mints or sweets anymore, but complimentary condoms. And all proceeds go to Thailand’s Population and Community Development Association (PDA). This is a non-profit organisation which launched Cabbages and Condoms after declaring that condoms should become as ordinary as cabbages. Where else if not in Thailand? 
4. Zauo Fishing Restaurant in Tokyo
A boat surrounded by a large sea pool in the middle of the bustling Tokyo. Very original and challenging for its customers, the restaurant will make its patrons to catch their dinner by themselves.
Catch your dinner!
So, if you are planning to go fishing, you can try this new ‘pond’, but be aware of the rules: you must eat whatever you catch. Choose wisely and take your time unless you want to end up eating very expensive fish instead of chowing on some cheaper Mackerel.
5. Modern Toilet Restaurants, Taiwan and Hong Kong
With a truly very unusual theme, the Modern Toilet is a chain of restaurants spread throughout Hong Kong and Taiwan. Why is it so different? Well, because the interior design is made of plungers that hang from the ceiling alongside lights shaped like faeces.
As a guest, you’ll sit on toilets – that’s not so uncomfortable if you think about it – eat your food from miniature toilet bowls and drink cocktails out of tiny urinals.
It doesn’t really sound like your dream restaurant-toilet? I can’t tell you anything about the food, I’m afraid you’ll have to try that by yourselves and let us know.
6. Dinner in the sky, Brussels
Are you afraid of heights? Then don’t go for this ‘heavenly meal’! “Dinner in the Sky” is a restaurant based in Brussels, Belgium, but you can find it in various countries as well.
London Dinner in the Sky
A chef, a waiter, and an entertainer serve meals for up to 22 persons suspended at a height of 50 meters. Build unforgettable memories while eating in the..sky.
Find more here.
7. Nyotaimori, Japan
Sushi and nudity go fish in mouth! You’re quite confused about this, aren’t you? Well, try to eat sushi off a perfectly still, naked woman’s body and not be puzzled by it.
This Japanese tradition is called “Nyotaimori” and it is also know as “body sushi”. These restaurants are actually very rare.
Geisha House in Las Vegas, as well as Yoshi in Rome can delight you with naked sushi.
“However, following the body sushi tradition, Japanese invented another kind of Nyotaimori restaurant, where the body is made from edible ingredients, and it is set on an operating table, much as though in a hospital.”
Imagine you’re a surgeon and you can cut the body and eat whatever you find inside. To make it as real as possible, the body will also bleed.
8. Dark Restaurant, Beijing
The Chinese opened the first dark-dining restaurant in Asia in 2006. It has become very popular ever since in another parts of the world as well.
The concept is similar in all the dark restaurants: the clients are welcomed in a luminous entrance hall, then they are guided by waiters wearing night-vision goggles to their seats.
But they are also asked to dispose of all luminous sources as lighters, mobile phones, cameras, watches. So, they all dine in darkness, an extraordinary journey which arises even more your appetite along with your other senses: smell, taste, touch.
You can also find this concept in countries like Romania, Austria,Denmark ,USA and others.
9. Foreign cinema restaurant, San Francisco
This is more of a personal, subjective choice, I have to admit. Being so keen on movies, I would love to experience dinner in a cinema restaurant that screens foreign films while I’m enjoying my food in a covered outdoor courtyard.
image by foreigncinema.com
Chic, intimate, artistic, this would be a very delicious experience for any food/film fan.
More on this at http://www.foreigncinema.com.
10. Traveler Food and Books, USA
For those of us who find books the best companions while travelling, this restaurant, located in Union, Connecticut, USA, will seem like an oasis. The restaurant offers a unique dining experience, hosting over 100,000 books which are given away every year. Indeed, the books come free with your meal.
Books and meals. Photo courtesy to gonewengland.about.com
Imagine how lovely would be to browse its shelves while waiting on your meal. Surely the quest is even harder when you have to choose one volume for free. So, if ever in the area, don’t miss this restaurant that will feed both your belly and your brain.
Find more about its history here.
11. Restophone, Montpellier, France
Whether a timid Casanova or a lady looking for prince charming, this restaurant can offer you a great evening out. On each table there’s a telephone and a highlighted number so you can start up a conversation with whomever you want or fancy. You can also ask someone to dance with you or play games about how the one who called looks like.
I believe this is an utterly original way to see some sparks in the air while enjoying your food.
Learn more about it here.
12. Breweries with beer baths
I know this is not counting as a restaurant, but it is pretty unusual to take a bath in beer, isn’t it? (Not for the heavy drinkers maybe!)
Famous for their beers, countries like Czech Republic, Austria and Germany offer you the possibility to sit back and relax in a beer bath.
Beer Baths in Czech Republic bychodovar.cz
Beer Baths are an original curative spa therapy combining remedial effects of warm mineral water, beer, ingredients for brewing beer, products of the brewing process and classical as well as special massages. This sounds quite appealing, but no matter how thirsty you might be, try not to drink it from the same bath you’re in.
13. Entertaining restaurants
There’s a variety of restaurants with acrobatic or artistic servers who entertain their patrons while having dinner. At Ed Debevic‘s in Chicago, USA, the waiters are dressed in characters and dance on counters, while in Amsterdam, at Palazzo, the dinner becomes a show with acrobatics and comedy.
Across the USA, as well as in many European countries - France, UK, Germany, Denmark, Spain, Netherlands, Israel - there are restaurants that will amuse their clients with singing waiters and waitresses, interactive horror dinner shows, catapulted BBQ chickens or flying vegetables.
Moreover, you can crawl on the table to get to your seat, dwarfs can serve you in Afghanistan, pay as you please in Ireland, enjoy some rude service in the States, release your anger in Philippines, cook your food in Belgium, swap your chair for a large silky bed in Germany or find an exclusive, underground, secret restaurant like this one in London.
Find a list of many themed, strange or unusual restaurants all over the world here. Which one is your favourite?
