The Restaurant of Mistaken Orders emphasizes high-quality food and positive interactions
A n order for a hamburger steak can turn into pot stickers, but mistakes aren’t fussed over in this caring setting.
It’s a restaurant in Tokyo with a intriguing disclaimer, one that states, “At this restaurant, no one knows if what you ordered will come out OK.”
It is aptly named The Restaurant of Mistaken Orders, and all of the servers taking those orders have dementia.
“We want to have a place where everyone thinks, ‘Well, it’s OK if there was a mistake,’ everyone there just accepts the mistake, and they all laugh about it and have fun,” said the project’s organizer Shiro Oguni.
When he was working as a director for NHK, a Japanese news organization, in 2012, Oguni reported on Yukio Wada’s group home. Wada was well-known as a “maverick” in the dementia care industry. “At first I had an image in my head of dementia being a little scary, one of aimlessly wandering about and of abusive language. But when I visited, it was a cozy place and completely different than I imagined. Wada thought first that before dementia, everyone is a person. So even if they have dementia they can cook and clean and do what they can by themselves. The job of the care home should be to support their ability to live their own lives until the very end. This group home was the implementation of that idea.”
He recalls lunch time on the day he did that report. He ordered a hamburger steak, but was served gyoza (pot stickers) instead. “I was surprised and thought, ‘the only thing that’s right about this is the ground meat.’ But I was the only one there that was about to point that out.”
No one among the elderly residents and the care workers said a word about it, and they were eating the gyoza with gusto. “Seeing this, I got so embarrassed. I wanted to correct a mistake. But if everyone takes it in in the moment, then it ceases to be a mistake. It was eye-opening when I realized that.” The idea for ‘The Restaurant of Mistaken Orders’ came to him then.
Five years after that, he suffered from heart troubles, and he quit his physically taxing job as a news director. When he was searching for new ways to communicate information, he realized that “right, now is the time to do it.” He contacted Wada before doing anything else. Wada replied, “I’d be glad to collaborate.” The project got going.
They developed guiding concepts and arrived on “focus on quality” and “we don’t make mistakes on purpose.”
“We wanted to make a place where, when the customers come, they feel that it looks delicious and fun, and people with dementia just happen to be working there; a place to spontaneously interact with dementia,” Oguni said. “We didn’t want to depend on excuses like, ‘We’re doing a good thing, so even if we make mistakes please forgive them.’ So the chefs perfected their cooking to almost Michelin-star level.”
He thought that people might want mistakes to be made. However, “Kazuo Mikawa spoke up during the meetings. His wife has early-onset Alzheimer’s. He said ‘When I see my wife make a mistake, it’s really hard on her.’ When I heard that, I thought, ‘of course.’ We scrapped mistake-making as a goal. Then, we decided to think only of how the people with dementia and the customers could have fun interacting.”
Then in June 2017, they had a two-day pre-opening, set in a small restaurant with 12 seats. The waitstaff were six people from Wada’s care facility, and the customers were limited to their friends and acquaintances. “Although they went to get orders, they would forget and think, ‘What did I come here to do anyway?’ Or, would bring an iced coffee when the order was for a cola. There were a ton of mistakes on that day — and laughs. But together the customers communicated and resolved issues, saying, ‘This is probably for that table.’ They embraced the situation with laughter. They said things like, ‘Oh well, it’s fine even if there’s mistakes.’ It produced an open-minded atmosphere.”
Three months after that, they opened the restaurant again ahead of Sept. 21, World Alzheimer’s Day. A waitstaff of 18 welcomed 300 customers in three days. It was a great success.
“I found Mr. Misawa really impressive. He had worked in a restaurant and suffered from early-onset Alzheimer’s in his 60s,” Oguni said. “The restaurant was on a four-shift rotation with one shift being 90 minutes. But in his 10-minute break, with no one telling him, he swept and cleaned the restaurant. That attitude to his job that was so ingrained, to welcome the customers to a clean restaurant, must have come naturally. I felt that I saw his attitude to life. His wife, Yasuko Misawa, who was a pianist, was also similar. She performed in front of the customers, but there were some times that she couldn’t play well, and it seemed like her back was shaking with frustration. I was moved that she saw herself as a professional.”
Shizu, a 90-year-old former hostess of a ryotei (traditional Japanese restaurant), had a customer ask her, “My mother is 90 as well, but she doesn’t have energy. I want to show her that I met such a lively person, so can we take a picture?”
“After Shizu got home, she happily told her family all about it, saying, ‘I still got it,’” Oguni said. “I was really excited that her interactions there gave her confidence. People can work even with dementia if they just have the appropriate support. We showed this as a possibility, I thought it was a big step.”
Also, proper wages were paid for the time worked. “Whether they put it away safely, or cheerfully went shopping, each and every person looked really happy. Something as extremely normal as getting paid was such a big joy for them.”
Even though The Restaurant of Mistaken Orders has made a great splash, there are no plans to make a permanent or directly managed restaurant.
“Our role is to first grow a big flower, and to send its seeds far and wide. After that, I think it’s best that those who take up those seeds run it in their own way in their own regions.”
Up until this point, other than the 30 events held in Japan, it has opened overseas in places like China, Korea and the U.K.
“Ultimately, I want our society to become one where everyone has an open mindset. I want us to not have to have these events. But, we have a long way to go until we reach that point. Until then we will act as a bridge,” Oguni said.
Translated from Japanese by Kevin Sword. Courtesy of The Big Issue Japan / INSP.ngo Street Roots is an award-winning weekly publication focusing on economic, environmental and social justice issues. The newspaper is sold in Portland, Oregon, by people experiencing homelessness and/or extreme poverty as means of earning an income with dignity. Street Roots newspaper operates independently of Street Roots advocacy and is a part of the Street Roots organization. Learn more about Street Roots . Support your community newspaper by making a one-time or recurring gift today .
