The Restaurant of Mistaken Orders is a place in Japan you can go and eat if you don't mind getting something different from what you ordered. On average, they bring you the wrong meal about 40 percent of the time. Probably because all the waiters have dementia.
And people love it. They laugh and socialize and they leave with a deeper understanding that while dementia is a disease that robs people of their memory, they are still good people with value to society.
It probably helps that all the food is amazing, so it doesn’t really matter if they bring you what you ordered or something else completely, it’s going to be delicious. Because all the food in Japan is delicious. All of it. Did you know that Tokyo has three times as many Michelin-starred restaurants as Paris?
When the wife and I were in Japan, we splurged on ludicrously expensive sushi restaurants, and ate at $5 ramen shops under train tracks, and both were amazing. As incredible as the food itself is in Japan, at least part of the reason I think it all tastes so good is because you are eating it while in Japan. Almost as much as taste, location matters when you are eating, so when you are munching on sushi along the stunningly beautiful Kamo River in Kyoto amid the blossoming cherry trees, it’s better in a way that transcends the flavour alone.
Sure, you can eat your ricotta stuffed manicotti and sip espresso at a dozen different really great Italian restaurants in Niagara, but do the same thing on the outdoor patio at Vaticano Restaurant in Fort Erie, at the edge of Niagara River, watching the boats gently trundle past, and I guarantee you it will taste better.
There is no better patio dining experience in Niagara than at Vaticano. Not every restaurant can be blessed with such a picturesque waterfront patio though, but the next best thing is just a good streetfront patio.
Did you know that Tokyo has three times as many Michelin-starred restaurants as Paris?
When the pandemic struck, municipalities across Niagara were quick to jump on the streetfront patio bandwagon and allow restaurants to set up patios in the parking spaces in front of their buildings. The program was not without its detractors.
I remember a city hall meeting about the patio program in Port Colborne where a non-restaurant business owner along West Street was irate that the restaurant beside hers was using two parking spots for a patio. She claimed this made a “barricade” in front of her shop that made it hard for customers to reach the front door. This made no sense to me because, for one thing, the patio only barely extended into the front of her shop, maybe three or four feet, and for another thing, if the patio wasn’t there, then cars would have been parked there, and if you’ve seen the size of soccer mom SUVs and cowboy-wannabe pickup trucks these days, you’d know that a couple of parked cars is a way larger “barricade” than a waist-high patio.
But no good deed goes unpunished, that’s something I’ve learned from my time as a local reporter. Streetfront patios are good for business, good for diners, and good for the general look and feel of our downtowns, but that won’t be enough to save them.
With the pandemic behind us, cities are looking again at streetfront patios and many of them are hesitant to keep the program going. At a council meeting last week in Niagara-on-the-Lake, councillors expressed concern with renewing the program because the patios hog “valuable” parking spots in Old Town.
Look, parking has always sucked in Old Town, it will continue to suck in Old Town, and the loss of a small handful of parking spots isn’t going to make it any worse. The town even did some questionable envelope math and claimed that the patio spaces are robbing the town of $12,000 worth of parking revenue each year. Yes, a whole $12,000. Big damn deal. Trading $12,000 in parking revenue for 22 awesome patios seems like a pretty good deal to me.
Really though, the issue goes beyond numbers and parking revenue and all that stuff. Having streetfront patios creates the kind of warm, magical, inviting downtown experience that brings people to places like Kyoto and Paris. These cities understand that a good dining experience is enhanced by the outdoor scenery.
Most of the time anyway. Famed 19th century French author Guy de Maupassant hated the Eiffel Tower. He hated it so much that he dined at the Eiffel Tower restaurant every single day. Why? Because he said it was the only place in Paris where he could eat and not have to look at it.
James Culic-san will never shut up about that one time he went to Japan. Find out how to yell at him at the bottom of the page. Or send a cranky letter to the editor.
