Tokyo restaurant serves up nontraditional experience for women
12:42 p.m. Monday, July 21, 2008
Dream life meets real life at the Butler Cafe.
Tiaras grace the head of giddy customers or princesses, as they're called here. They're served sweets and tea and surrounded by flowers.
All of the servers are Western men, ready to wait on customers hand and foot.
It's innocent fun, nothing more, they say.
"I thought it was English teaching or nothing. Apparently there's other work out here for us," waiter Thor Helgason said.
The owner came up with the concept by walking through the streets of Shibuya. She spoke to 200 women who all told her the same thing: They wanted a cafe where the waiters were male, good looking, would treat them nice, but most importantly, were Western.
"Being a gentleman is embarrassing for Japanese men," cafe owner Yuki Hirohata said. "Our culture isn't like that."
Hirohata says women are exhausted by the rules of Japanese society, unyielding in its expectations of a woman's role in maintaining a career, home, husband and family.
"We're tired from our daily lives," one customer said. "These guys are different than Japanese men. They're smoother and make me feel specialer."
"I think for the princesses, it's refreshing to see, this guy who's confident, saying how are you," waiter Chrispin Deverill said.
Brendan Reed, a native of Chicago, Ill. doesn't mind being the object of their affection.
"You have bars for men, you have bars for women. You have Hooters. You have a lot of places where you're going into a kind of special place, or a special area where the rules are a little different," Reed said.
It's campy and silly, perhaps. But for just one lunch, these ladies say, it's their storybook come to life.
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