The Key Hole Bar in Mackinac City, MI sitcks out in my mind. The decor is…keys. There must be a million keys in there. Everything is covered with keys–glued on surfaces, hanging in chains…it’s pretty cool and weird.
Whatever else you say about the Cracker Barrel, they have great chicken and dumplings, some of the best restaurant I’ve found. They’re not ever going to top my mom’s but if I get desperate, that’s where I’d go.
-Lil
I once ate at a similar place in Dayton, Ohio. This place was supposed to be the field headquarters of a US Army Air Corps base in France, in WWI! The food was suck-o terrible!
Oh, and that old 1960’s chain (The “Victoria Station”)-you eat in old train boxcars…what a stupid idea for a restaurant! There still is one in Burlington, MA.-nothing special, but they do have good clam chowder.
The food quality at the 101st is great.
We used to have one of those in St Pete/Clearwater area called the 94th Aero Squadron. I know that one was a chain. The good part of it was they showed old silent films with theater popcorn while you waited for a table. The food was mediocre.
We also used to have a restaurant, not far from here, called Jo Ann’s Chili Bordello. It was decorated like a bordello inside, with red velvet wallpaper and the waitress were all cute young things in sort of playboy bunny costumes without the ears or tails. I guess you’d call it a merry widow with stockings and garters. They mostly just served beer and several different styles of chili. It’s been gone for over 10 years, at least.
Berlin has/had a couple:
KLO (which is slang for toilet) was a bar/restaurant and they had rolls of toilet paper on each table for “napkins” and when you ordered their specialty, sausage with sauerkraut, they served it (I kid you not) in a bedpan…with the sausage placed on the sauerkraut and the mustard spread around the rim of the bedpan.
There was also a bar/restaurant called the RUINE (ruins) because it was in back of an old apartment house that had been bombed in WWII and never fixed up…so you literally walked through the ruins of the front of the building and then there was a beer garden and bar in the back.
There is also a large pleasure boat that tours the lakes and waterways of Berlin, serves dinner and coffee and cake, and was built to look like a whale and is aptly named “Moby Dick”.
Ciao Bella in Boulder Creek, outside Santa Cruz.
The whole place looks like an acid trip came to life and was in a car crash with a clown car, a van carrying a theater troupe, and a VW bus full of deep-thinking poets wearing berets.
It’s actually a bit like Noc Noc or Odeon in San Francisco, btu Ciao BElla takes it to a whole new level of bizarre.
Pinnacle Peak is a steak house near San Diego. Supposedly if you wear a tie, the waitress will appear with a pair of scissors and cut it off. The walls are decorated with the remains of victims, or at least the remains of their ties. They also supposedly sing a loud song and bang pots at your table during the process, but I didn’t witness that personnally.
Here in San Diego there is a chain of fish restaurants owned by a family, the places range from really upscale to fast-food. One of the sites sits on it’s own lake and is decorated like the inside of an underwater cave (we call it the “Fish Cave”): the walls look like papier mache (probably fiberglass) and there are all kinds of plastic sea critters and flora “living” in the nooks and crannies. There are tile mosaics a la “ruins of Atlantis” and the salt and pepper shaker holders are coral rocks.
It’s kind of cool but can also be a little unappetizing while you’re eating the very animals that are looking at you so cutely from the cave walls.
Chicken Pie Shop has been here since 1925 and serves a mean $3.25 lunch and supper (chicken pie, chicken soup and a roll.) As with the Fish Cave, the decor is “look what you’re eating” and as such every space not taken up with food service is covered in chicken kitsch.
Rainforest Cafe has got to be the most insane marketing idea, that is loud, annoying and overpriced. Even before I had hearing loss and had two functioning ears I couldn’t hear my husband sitting next to me. The kids are hit with som much sensory overload they just go into ga-ga land. Their gift shop at the front of the place is just crap and overpriced. It’s too chaotic.
The fish tank, however, rocks.
The one by STL airport has headphones available to plug into wall jacks and you can hear the pilots chatting with Tower and Ground. Or at least it used to, haven’t been for awhile. It was great entertainment for kids, and they could watch the McBoeing fighter jets taking off!! 
I would like to second the Joe’s Crab Shack.
Very odd to be sitting in a ocean themed restaurant in the middle of Michigan.
Yum. I want to go there now.
There is an Italian place near me owned by a former boxer who had moderate success in the late '50s-early '60s. I guess the Italian part is authentic (the boxer’s name is Italian, at any rate), and the food is quite good. But the restaurant is a warren of little rooms like a sprawling house and NOTHING has been updated since 1965. There are pictures on every wall of 3rd rate boxers posed with their dukes up and their pasty-white flabby abs flopping over their tight briefs. Some are even autographed! The tables, chairs, menus, waitresses, drinks, carpet, cutlery, bowl of after dinner mints–all circa 1958. And it’s not done with tongue in cheek either. The owners have let the place age (as they have, undoubtedly). It even smells old.
This is a popular place. You’ll wait 45 minutes for a table most nights. It’s like stepping into the past. Except for the prices. THOSE they manage to update regularly.
There is a place in Manhattan, The Jekyl and Hyde Club. Very strange. The statues talk to you during your meal, and there is a show going on where Mr. Hyde escapes and is loose in the club. Very pricey but good fun. Glad I did it once.
IIRC that was a 94th Aero Squadron.
If you’re ever in Vegas, check out Quark’s Bar and Restaurant at the Star Trek Experience. I recommend the Kahless and the Seven of Nine Seafood Collective.
My favorite weird restaurant is / was a Hooters in Manhattan (NYC). Outside, it looked like your typical bank / office building facade. Only the traditional orange Owl sign gave it away. Inside it looked like every other Hooters in America, except for the very New York-looking girls. When this big-breasted big-nosed beauty (not!) said “Welcome ta Hooters, sit where-evva” in a super-thick NYC/JAP accent, complete with condescending sneer, the sensory disconnect was too much. I hadda stay, but I hadda leave. It was TOO weird.
Sounds like “Traildust Steakhouse”.
ShibbOleth: They closed JoAnn’s Chilli Bordello? No way! (I used to live in your neck of the woods, and I remember it).
But did you ever eat atDogwater Cafe? http://www.dogwatercafe.net/franchise/
Everything is “doggone good”, your food is served in a dog dish, and the waitresses all wear shorts that look like they have muddy dog paw prints on the butt. Motto: “We treat you like the dog you are”
BigBadVoodooLou: If I’m ever in Orlando, I am so going to the Pac-Man Cafe. A Namco-themed restaurant… what could be better? I’m guessing they either didn’t have room for a Soul Calibur section, or Voldo was found to make people lose their appetites. Maybe by the time I get around to going there, they’ll have a Katamari Damacy themed section. Imagine bus-boys rolling up silverware and plates on a magnetic Katamari.
Other video game companies should get into this. How about a Square themed restaurant, specializing in a Gysahl Greens salad? Or tucking into a Leg of Werewolf at a Konami themed restaurant?
Back to reality, the oddest restaurant I’ve ever eaten at was Crabby Bob’s in San Ber’dino, California. The decor was somewhere between TGI Friday’s and your typical seafood restaurant, but that wasn’t the weird part. That would be how the waitstaff made animal-shaped aluminum-foil hats for the kids.
Casa Bonita in Denver… You may be familiar with it if you watch South Park. It’s the weirdest thing… A very, very large, themed Mexican restaurant in a plain old shopping center - just down a few doors down from the dollar store.
But once you get inside there’s all sorts of crazy stuff. They have cliff divers and melodramas, a cave you can walk through, dungeons, an arcade, puppet shows. The place is huge, the food is mediocre.
Cafe Oasis in Santa Fe. They’re this funky all-organic restaurant that makes me think someone was on acid, decided to open a restaurant, and did so. They’re kind of overpriced and the food is mediocre, but they’ve got a Tahitian-themed room, a ‘romance room’, and a mushroom room (my fave) amongst others. In the 'shroom room, you can either sit at a giant mushroom table, or up on a loft (good for tinyshort people like me, bad for most others). I believe in the ‘romance’ room, your only option is cushions on the floor. The place is covered in tile mosiacs, all made from broken-in-the-line-of-duty glasses and plates/bowls/etc. There’s also a large neon Virgin of Guadelupe up on the roof.