Oh for the days when a wacky dining experience meant the singing waiters at TGI Friday.
Those days are long gone, and their relatively tame wackiness has been replaced by restaurants themed to resemble everything from airports to hospitals to Mars.
What you need to know about LumiDolls – Barcelona’s brothel where women have been replaced by inflatable dollsBefore any of them, there was Funny Sex, a coitus-themed restaurant in Taiwan where sex and food collided.
Anyone who has ever introduced food into their foreplay will know that the whole thing is liable to end up in one big sticky mess.
Such was the fate of Funny Sex: it was lauded as being Taiwan’s very first sex-themed restaurant, but two years after opening, it closed its doors.
It goes to show, not every opening is enticing.
Sex education while you eat
Taiwan is not a country known for its liberal approach to sex, so the main ‘thrust’ of Funny Sex (thanks folks, I’ll be here all week) was ostensibly sexual education.
The ‘funny’ bit was simply a hook to entice customers – and what a hoot it was.
Journalist Jamie Fullerton has made something of a career out of visiting the world’s weirdest, wackiest restaurants, and it was only a matter of time before Funny Sex was on the menu.
‘I saw a ‘look at this crazy sex restaurant’ article on a small quirky news website, and decided I needed to go there to do my own ‘look at this crazy sex restaurant’ article,’ he says.
‘I built a holiday to Taiwan around a visit to Funny Sex. [It] turned out that Taiwan is a wonderful place, regardless of whether you eat phallus-shaped food there or not.’
Sexy art
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From the outside, Funny Sex looked neither funny, nor sexy: it had the look of a dodgy strip club, hidden away up some steps with only a red Y-fronts logo to give it away.
It didn’t get much better inside: grey walls; plain, dark wood tables and a smattering of sex paraphernalia across the walls that far from being unique looked like ‘half of Taobao (Alibaba’s version of eBay/Amazon) taped to the walls,’ says Fullerton.
This included neon signs depicting couples engaged in various sex acts, as well as more ‘interactive’ pieces like inflatable penises and naked aprons, complete with boobs you can squeeze.
A giant, wooden penis in the middle of the room offered little titillation and fewer titters, despite the polaroids of guests posing alongside it.
Overall, it was like, ‘pretty much every other quirky theme restaurant in Asia I’ve been to,’ Fullerton added.
Would you like a sex doll with that?
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Dining alone? Not to worry. Funny Sex was known for its unique dining companion: an inflatable doll that was placed ‘hilariously’ next to diners for mealtime stimulation.
‘It was quite funny when a teenage lad started pretending to give the blow-up sex doll slobbery oral sex,’ recalls Fullerton.
Funny? Possibly. Sexy? Not so much.
‘It wasn’t in any way sexy to me, a heterosexual man, but that was perhaps because the decor was weighted far more towards the phallic than the vaginal.’
Sadly, Fullerton reveals the educational aspect wasn’t up to much either.
‘There was a racist sign on the wall outlining average penis length for various nationalities, so I suppose you could call that educational.’
Just in case you’re wondering – the chaps of the Congo came top, measuring in at a wince-inducing 18cm; next, were Iceland (16.51cm), followed by the UK (13.97cm), the US (12.95cm) and China (10.92cm).
Edible genitals
During Fullerton’s visit, he found Funny Sex full of ‘mainly rowdy teenagers holding cock-shaped items in front of their groin areas for selfies. And one pretty young lady who was eating a ludicrously enormous brown ice cream slab in the shape of – yet again – a penis.’
If you could mold a foodstuff into the shape of a penis, Funny Sex would serve it: think rice arranged as a dick and ice cream threaded with freakishly realistic veins.
If your dish wasn’t crafted into a phallic shape, you didn’t miss out: the seafood stew was served in jugs, and I don’t even need to make a pun here: the bowls were decorative breasts – nipple and all.
The phrase style over substance could have been coined for Funny Sex. In Fullerton’s estimation, the food was ‘poor to average’.
He added: ‘I swear that all these theme restaurants get their food from the same place. And not a very good place.’
Just in case you were wondering if/hoping that Funny Sex’s hilarious, horny hi-jinks were limited to the dining area, a trip to the loo revealed wall-mounted breasts that dispensed soap.
More: Sex
For all its budget smut, the sex tack tacked onto the walls and the phallic food that was not worth the calories, could one consider, even, Funny Sex to be a much-needed bastion of progression in a sexually-repressed society?
Err, well…
‘I don’t think the place was reflective of anything other than the owner’s desire to have a wacky restaurant,’ says Fullerton.
‘Although it’s fair to say that Taiwanese society as a whole is probably more liberal than that of mainland China.
‘There was a bondage-themed restaurant operating in Beijing recently that I contacted to write an article about, but they’d had some heat from municipal authorities.
‘Some local officials just don’t like eating cock, I guess.’
The Funny Sex effect
Funny Sex may now be no more but its legacy lives on in these raunchy restaurants from around the world, including that bondage-themed restaurant in China:
The Robot Restaurant, Tokyo: At the Robot Restaurant, scantily clad women dance suggestively alongside robots, and sometimes on robots, and there are lots of lights and mirrors – but weirdly, no food. Instead, guests can sup on expensive beer and bottled tea and enjoy erotic/robotic dance shows that last 90 minutes.
La Bodega Negra, London: Access to this renowned subterranean restaurant is through a sex shop on Old Compton Street in the heart of scandalous Soho.
Ke’er, Beijing: Whips on the walls. Cups with penis handles. Waiters wearing inflatable breast aprons. The owner has plans to handcuff visitors to one another. It’s an acquired taste.
Modern Toilet, Taiwan and China: Not strictly sex but it’s all to do with your private parts – does that count?
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