There was a Victoria Station in Fort Lauderdale for a while. And JoAnne’s Chili Bordello was also in Jax FL when I was growing up in the 70s.
I wish I could have eaten at this place:
http://lileks.com/institute/motel/index.html
VCNJ~
My two picks would have to be the George Jetsonesque Encounter at LAX - looks great from the outside but I’ve never seen the inside; although my office is less than three miles away, it’s too expensive for lunch.
and the execrable A.J. Spurs of Buellton, California. (I think it’s in Buellton. It’s somewhere up there in Vandenberg AFB/Michael Jackson country). Nothing like sinking your teeth into a prime steak with the hollow, dead eyes of a mangy stuffed bobcat staring you in the face.
Unintentional: A mexican restaurant moved into a former Captain D’s (chain fast food seafood place). It was kind of odd to be eating tacos & nachos in a nautical-themed place.
Intentional: The Sci-Fi Dine-In Theater at Walt Disney World.
In Bettendorf IA, a suburb of Moline IL, there was a Tudor-themed hotel named Jumer’s Castle. Google tells me it’s since been renovated and renamed The Lodge.
The place was spooky in the extreme, long dark halls, lined with pictures whose eyes followed you, etc. Wall sconces mounted every few feet with those dim flickering-flame lamps. They even had a story of a resident ghost, a guest murdered not long after the hotel had opened; she often was heard vacuuming the halls at 2 am.
The dining room was a three-story tall room like a tudor-style barn. White plaster, exposed dark beams, etc. It was big enough for about 100 diners, so the room proportions were all wrong. Waay too tall and not real wide.
The walls were covered with stuffed trophy animal heads. From about shoulder height all the way up to near the ceiling 30 feet above your head. Without exaggeration, there were 200 animal heads there. Some were local critters, bears & bobcats and ferrets and such, others were African game, caribou, moose, even IIRC, a mounted fish or two. Nothing like a caribou flanking a marlin next to a tiger to give a welcoming impression to a restuarant offering otherwise indifferent generic hotel fare.
They hadn’t been dusted in years, if not decades, and some where starting to show some age with peeling fur & such. Most had a few cobwebs (real ones) linking antlers to nose to wall.
Eating dinner with the lights down, oil candles in red chimneys flickering on every table, and no more than 1 or 2 tables occupied was always a delight. You figured any moment the ghosts of those creatures would convene to wreak their vengeance on the humans who’d killed and mounted them there. On nights with thunderstorms it got positively Poe-ish in there.
Even breakfast, with bright sum streaming in the small high-mounted windows, made you think how hard it’d be to clamber up the walls to escape through those windows once the attacking animals had blocked both the gound-level doors.
It succeeded in being novel, well-known for miles around, but in a VERY creeepy way.
Eh.
The steaks at that joint stink.
:dubious:
There’s a place in town here (London, Ontario) called “Spageddy Eddy’s” (heh, took forever to find their number in the phone book…). Its right downtown, and the entrance is located off a sketchy alley way that you have to walk down. Once inside, you decend this narrow staircase into a labyrinth of walls decorated in album covers from the 60s through 80s. The whole place has the feeling of a cave. Its completely underground; there are no windows. The eating area is all wood, with wooden tables and chairs. It looks like a log cabin, except underground, and covered in album covers.
Food isn’t great, but the portions are huge.
There is a place in Tucumcari, NM on old Route 66 that is shaped like a giant sombrero. The inside is very typical real Mexican restaurant but the outside is pretty unique.
There was (possibly is still) a place beneath a number of businesses on Main Street, Fort Collins, CO called the Catacombs. Basically it is a restaurant that looks like a series of caves. Very nice affects and very nice food.
There is a Moroccan restaurant in Colorado Springs basically done in huge tents and pillows to create the effect that it is a huge Bedouin tent. Interesting to note, it is in the basement of a bank. It used to be called Mataam Fez, but I believe they changed their name to something less Arabic not long after 2001 because they were getting threats and such. Wonderful food, no silverware though, you must eat with your hand from a communal dish.
Tail-0-the Pup hot dog stand. There used to be one like this here in San Jose (or was it on the peninsula?) but I can’t seem to google it up.
Oh, yeah, there was also a 94th aero squadron at San Jose airport that fits Bosda’s description. Really good food, and I think it had the headphones. Not sure if it’s still there.
There WAS a restaurant overlooking the port in Amsterdam which I loved.
‘Wilhelmina dok’
Until THIS happened this afternoon.
A frigging ship ran into it. :eek:
3 persons hurt. One Dutchwoman sitting on the restaurant terrace, two American women on the ship.
Restaurant is falling apart.
There was a place in my old hometown called Crazy Otto’s. It started as a diner right by the railroad tracks, and then they started building on. An aluminum patio cover was walled in; and there were a couple of rooms just kind of stuck on. The wind whistled through the cracks in the walls pretty good. If you sat at the counter in the diner proper, when a train went by they would spin a wheel with the seat numbers on it. If your seat number came up, your meal (breakfast or lunch) was free. And the food was really great. I think it finally got condemned and they moved to a more conventional location far away from the railroad tracks. The food was still great and they migrated the train decor from the original diner. It was cool.
(In Amsterdam) still around? I always cracked up with the name-in english, the name always had a funny connotation.
One restaurant out in the suburbs of Hamamatsu, Japan is decorated with the complete (or near complete) remains of at least five military aircraft. Two are completely outside, while the others poke through the walls, floor and ceiling. The menu is fairly ordinary and the rest of the place isn’t that military- or aviation-themed at all.
In Roppongi in Tokyo there’s a restaurant/bar called Muse that seems to be designed to keep people out. The main door in the front is actually a fake decoration that won’t move. The real door is hidden a little to the side and looks like a small window with a flower bed under it (you pull the flower bed to open the door). Once inside, it’s a darkened room with several tables and identical metal/bead hangings all over the walls. One of the hangings, however, conceals a narrow hallway to another larger room with more tables. That room is lined with small alcoves, each with a table and benchs, all of them kept fairly dark. In one of those alcoves, behind the table, is another narrow hallway leading to stairs that go down to a larger bar with a pool table and dance floor.
hehehe. Because of: “Waiter, there are five flies in my soup”? 
Yes it’s still around. [unlike ‘Wilhelmina Dok’ ;)]
Nota Bene: The name comes from an old Dutch family name ‘VijffVlieghen’
So much for the old adage “wait til your ship comes in”. They could rename it Wilhelmina Titandok".
Never have stopped in, but always wanted to:
And I was gonna say the 94th Aerosquadron in College Park, MD. 1914 bunker and tables so dark you can’t read the menu. If you do manage to order, none of it is worth the price. But hell, it’s fun, yeah, right…
I’m surprised nobody has chimed in with this nationally-famous restaurant. Located in a strip plaza in Lakewood, Colorado, and featured on an episode of South Park, it’s Casa Bonita.
Words fail me in creating a worthy description, so I’ll just point you to their Web site. An excerpt"
Witness our brave cliff divers plunging from a spectacular 30-foot waterfall into our 14 feet deep pool.
As far as chains go, Claim Jumper goes on my “very vaguely creepy” list. I mean, sure, as themes go, “California Gold Rush” is pretty original, I guess. It’s just that the aesthetic just seems… sort of off, y’know? In that they’ve taken a hardscrabble, do-what-you-can-with-what-you-have, frontier lifestyle, and polished and enlarged it into American-style conspicuous-consumption ostentation. I mean, it’s one thing to have a light fixture made out of deer antlers; it’s something else entirely to have a giant fuckin’ chandelier made out of what looks like ten thousand of the things. Y’know?
(Not to mention the fact that you could feed a family of six for a week on one of their dinners, but that’s a rant for another thread.)
On the non-chain front, the decor isn’t that unusual, but last week I had lunch at The Celtic Bayou, which is, get this, a Cajun-Irish place. Bangers and mash next to etouffé. Er, yeah. Food was good, but decidedly an odd feel to the menu.
I like the restaurant here that’s shaped like a giant silver tea pot.
And the odd thing is they have only two kinds of tea, both in bags. Otherwise it’s just an eggs and hash diner.