A small pop-up restaurant in Tokyo where “no one knows if what you ordered will come out OK.”
It is aptly named The Restaurant of Mistaken Orders, and all of the servers taking those orders have dementia. Founded by former news organizer Shiro Oguni, after he stumbled upon Yukio Wada’s group home for dementia care. From an interview with Oguni:
“We want to have a place where everyone thinks, ‘Well, it’s OK if there was a mistake,’ everyone there just accepts the mistake, and they all laugh about it and have fun… At first I had an image in my head of dementia being a little scary, one of aimlessly wandering about and of abusive language. But when I visited, it was a cozy place and completely different than I imagined. Wada thought first that before dementia, everyone is a person. So even if they have dementia they can cook and clean and do what they can by themselves. The job of the care home should be to support their ability to live their own lives until the very end. This group home was the implementation of that idea.”
He recalls lunch time on the day he did that report. He ordered a hamburger steak, but was served gyoza (pot stickers) instead. “I was surprised and thought, ‘the only thing that’s right about this is the ground meat.’ But I was the only one there that was about to point that out.”
No one among the elderly residents and the care workers said a word about it, and they were eating the gyoza with gusto. “Seeing this, I got so embarrassed. I wanted to correct a mistake. But if everyone takes it in in the moment, then it ceases to be a mistake.”
(Via MetaFilter)