There’s this small restaurant/bar not far from where I live. It appears to be your basic yuppie cafe, with pasta dishes and a full bar, and come 6PM it seems to fill up pretty readily with the after-work crowd.
What’s odd about it is what I noticed when I had to use the men’s room. There’s a ciruitous corridor in the back, with about a half dozen tiny rooms opening off it. These rooms contain, and barely have room to contain, a TV set with VHS and DVD player, and a large comfortable couch. I’ve never seen anything like this in a restaurant or bar before. They’re obviously way too small to be banquet rooms. They didn’t seem to be furnished for the purpose of a couple wanting to have a quiet dinner. Rather, they seem better suited to sexual encounters, if anything, but that doesn’t seem likely either. Wouldn’t that make the restaurant a “house of assignation”, still illegal as far as I know?
"… Wafts of sickly sweet scent rise as the warm blade sears and passes through the
rich darkness of the opium, making it bubble against the hot steel. … "
“My father was a drunken bum, who was always on the dole,
My always walked the streets when she was on parole,
My brother owned a resaurant with bedrooms in the rear,
But they would never speak to me, cause I joined the Engineers”
Princeton’s run by Wellesley, and Wellesley’s run by Yale
And Yale is run by Vassar, and Vassar’s run by tail
Harvard’s run by stiff pricks, the kind you raise by hand
But M.I.T. is run by Engineers, the finest in the land!
A restaurant near us has that kind of set up, it’s for kareoke. However you spell it. You know, when you sing along to stuff. You can reserve a little room for a private group, I guess some people are more comfortable singing in front of just their friends instead of a crowded bar or restaurant.
Mild hijack – this is actually the normal way karaoke is done in Japan. Honestly, I like it far better than our way. My host father, on the other hand, liked our way better, because it was easier to ignore bad singers.
I do remember everyone who works there does seem to be Asian. However, something made me think they were Vietnamese rather than Japanese. It’s definitely not a Japanese restaurant at any rate. No sushi, no cat waving with its paw, no Japanese artwork, nothing like that.
Hey, hey, no restaurant racism in this board! I know of a Thai restaurant that has the waving kitty and a Korean restaurant that serves sushi (they also have “Mexican sushi”). I also know of a Japanese place that doesn’t serve sushi.
That said, I was going to make a joke about cement overshoes and pastatutes…
If the karaoke isn’t the answer, I’m guessing that they are essentially “make out rooms.” Do they have movies to rent, or are they BYOPorn?
My guess is that the space wasn’t originally configured for a restaurant. And maybe when they fitted into a restaruant, they kept the tiny rooms because they were there. And they stuck a couch/tv/etc. in there for small break rooms for the employees.
