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She’s wearing white knee-length socks and black high-heeled Mary Janes, a ruffled headband and a short petticoat-lined dress with puff sleeves, rounded collars and a patch-pocket apron — and she’s there to serve you tea and cucumber finger sandwiches.
French maid not your thing? Go dinosaur. A waitress in a tattered-hem cheetah-print miniskirt, black tank top, leather tool belt and a plastic bone-and-bead necklace, the pink bows on her fishnet socks peeking over her Uggs, will bring you a big bowl of “three-flavoured sauce chicken” and a plate of grilled meat.
A Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton will look on from the middle of the dining room.
Take your pick
Or maybe you’re looking for a Ginza Street scene and some crepes or a little rumble with your fried squid in the Amazon jungle.
Or maybe you just feel like sitting at a school desk and trying to decipher what’s on the blackboard while sipping iced grapefruit-honey green tea and snacking on chops, pickled vegetables and rice from a lunch tin.
It’s a bit of Tokyo — where “cosplay” (as in “costume play”) cafés reign — or a touch of Taipei — which might be the global epicentre of theme restaurants — in Southern California, no stranger to the thrill of simulacra served with dinner (think Café 50’s or Clifton’s Cafeteria, but crank up the imagination a few notches).
After all, Los Angeles is the birthplace of the first Polynesian-themed tiki bar — Don the Beachcomber (artefacts from tropical locales, exotic drinks, Cantonese dishes).
But it’s a new spin on the cultural mash when a squaw from the island formerly known as Formosa sports a pair of denim cutoffs and a feather in her hair in a dreamcatcher-decorated pub called Indian.
It’s the most popular of the San Gabriel Valley’s themed Taiwanese pubs, at least partly, because it has the best food, including specialities such as stir-fried sliced lamb with basil, fried oysters, sautéed a “choy”, and grilled corn or long-fermented — aka odorous or stinky — tofu.
For the atmosphere
Owner Su Yu Feng Yu bought the restaurant four years ago and brought in her own chef.
“I liked the atmosphere,” she says, “and all the young people who come to eat” — some of whom now call her “mama”.
There the refreshment flows, the flat-screen TVs are set to the latest Los Angeles Lakers game and T-Pain’s Get Low booms over speakers as diners tuck into “three-flavour” chicken (the three flavours refer to soya sauce, rice wine and sesame oil) at rough-hewn wooden tables arranged under fake maple trees.
The restaurant is modelled on a chain of pubs, also called Indian, in Taipei.
In fact, Taipei’s theme restaurants keep pushing the oddball envelope: A hospital-themed restaurant there is decorated with crutches and wheelchairs; waiters are dressed as nurses and drinks are poured into glasses from an IV tube.
Japanese interpretation
And a restaurant named Jail delivers the experience of eating behind bars, sort of, at least.
In Culver City, you will find a New York art collector’s interpretation of a Japanese maid café (or “Maid-Kissa”) — Royal/T Café, which opened recently in the Royal/T Art Gallery. Works by the likes of Takashi Murakami, Yayoi Kusama and Chris Ofili are featured there.
In the middle of the café is Murakami’s Jikok-Kun, 2003, a 6ft-tall stuffed animal (dangerously white in a room filled with tea and coffee drinkers).
“In this space, with all of the Japanese pop art, what better than a maid café?” says general manager Sandra Westwood.
“It’s a café inspired by certain aspects of the maid cafés in Japan.
But none of the waitresses here are greeting customers with ‘Welcome home, master’, feeding them with a spoon or stirring their coffee for them.”
It’s not just the Taiwanese expats or the hard-core otaku (those with obsessive interests, such as in Japanese anime) who are drawn to Asian-inflected cross-cultural experiential dining.
People from everywhere
On a recent Saturday night at dinosaur-themed Jurassic in the city of Industry, a group of non-Taiwanese ad-exec types share a hot pot and a pile of fried clams.
In a private nook, several non-Taiwanese fellows are holding a bachelor party.
“This is great, I like the atmosphere here,” says the groom-to-be, among the flurry of cavewomen carting hot dishes from the kitchen and hauling two buckets at a time to bus tables.
The dance tracks are loud at Amazon, where booths are dressed as thatched-roof huts and a PVC-pipe-lined “river” trickles through part of the dining room.
There is also a “bear crossing” sign (who knew there were bears in the Amazon?).
On the menu are the pub favourites (the ubiquitous three-flavoured chicken gets one-upped by five-flavoured squid), though prepared with less deftness than at Indian.
Inevitably, somebody gets up from his seat at the table and starts dancing to What Is Love a la A Night at the Roxbury.
Academically inspired
At Class 302, the waitresses are dressed in school uniforms, the menu is written (in Mandarin) on a big blackboard at the front of the room and diners sit at wooden desks.
After-school specials — “railroad-style” chops and egg-roll-like chicken “rolls” — come stacked in old-fashioned lunch tins. Shaved ice is a mix-and-match affair, with options such as tapioca, almond tofu, red bean, grass jelly and fudge.
And if you want the waitress’ attention, raise your hand as you did back in school.
How it came to be
Cosplay is short for “costume play”, a subculture centered on dressing as characters from manga, anime, tokusatsu, and video games, and, less commonly, Japanese pop music bands, Visual Kei, novels, and anything in the real world being unique and dramatic (or their more anthropomorphic form).
However, in some circles, “cosplay” has been expanded to mean simply wearing a costume.
The most specific anecdote about the origin of the word “cosplay” was that Nov Takahashi (from a Japanese studio called Studio Hard) coined the term as a contraction of the English-language words “costume play” while attending the 1984 Los Angeles Science Fiction Worldcon.
The word fits in with a common Japanese method of abbreviation: combining the first two moras of each word.
“Cos” becomes kosu and play become pure hence becoming the nearest Japanese approximation of cosplay, which is kosupure.
While Cosplay arguably originated in Japan, one should not be confused with the idea that Cosplay is considered typical behaviour in Japan.
While some do attend Cosplay functions that are held in districts such as Akihabara, most Japanese people find it to be rather silly.
In addition, because Cosplay in Japan has adapted such a negative sexual connotation, many Japanese have come to feel that it is reprehensible.
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