The Restaurant of “Wrong Orders”, Where the Waiters Are People With Dementia

Would you leave satisfied from a lunch or dinner at a restaurant where you ordered one thing and received another, where the elderly waitress sat with you at the table after showing you to your seat, or where an equally elderly waiter drank your glass of water that came with your coffee? 99% of the customers who frequent the place we are talking about today are, because the Restaurant of Mistaken Orders in Tokyo is not a restaurant like all the others. The restaurant of “mistaken orders,” in fact, has a staff entirely made up of employees who are generally elderly and suffer from dementia problems of various kinds.

The project was born to raise awareness about the problems related to dementia, a problem that affects about 40 million people around the world and in particular Japan, where people live particularly long. Dementia is a great social, health and economic challenge, which is why the restaurant project was born: a story that seems like a fairy tale to raise awareness about a topic that is still not discussed enough.

How the Restaurant Works

The idea of ​​the Wrong Orders restaurant came to television director Shiro Oguni and is very simple: a restaurant where only people work, mostly elderly, affected by dementia, of which Alzheimer's is one of the most known causes, although certainly not the only one nor the most frequent. A way to raise awareness on the issue, to make light of a reality that is often difficult even for the relatives of the sick people and a way to give these people a social value.

The restaurant is not always open – it can be considered as a sort of traveling event organized on specific days – but when it is, it is a place that has a unique atmosphere, impossible to find in any other restaurant defined as “normal”. Here the distribution of the dishes is completely random and the orders can arrive right or wrong, and the waiters are out of the ordinary: they sit at the table with the customers, serve the meals in an original way, chat between affectionate smiles and tears, often those of emotion of the customers.

The Wrong Orders Restaurant is an unusual but incredibly effective way to present the challenges that dementia poses to patients and their families. And the customers, much to the surprise of the creator of the project, are not annoyed, but rather sit down curious and get up satisfied. The credit for the success? The great organizational machine composed of professionals, not only in the fine cuisine but also in the health sector and associations that deal with dementia conditions.

But above all, the credit for the success goes to these people, adults who have become children again due to an illness, who in their disarming innocence know how to give their customers not only an excellent meal, but a human warmth that remains in your memory much more than the food you eat.

Restaurant of Mistaken Orders, a Project in Expansion

The restaurant of Wrong Orders was born in 2017 from an idea of ​​the television director Shiro Oguni. During a visit to a family home with elderly people suffering from dementia, he happened to receive a dish different from the one requested, but to experience the event with serenity precisely because of the atmosphere created by the sick people.

From there the spark: why not turn this funny mistake into a real restaurant, capable of raising public awareness on the widespread neurological condition, making society more open, inclusive and tolerant towards people with deteriorating cognitive functions?

The opening of the restaurant required a large initial investment, around 115,000 dollars, which were put together through a fundraiser, but it was a huge success: not only in Japan has the initiative been held regularly since 2017, but it has already been replicated in South Korea and Australia.

A great satisfaction for Shiro Oguni, who at first was worried that the initiative could be understood as a spectacularization of dementia, or that the people involved could be ridiculed. In reality it is quite the opposite: waiters and waitresses feel useful, still with a value despite the disease and their pure joy is so disarming that it leaves the guests with a deep emotion.