Matching french uniforms, patrons called ‘master’, welcome to St. B’s Japanese-style maid café

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 20/06/2015 (4045 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

During season 1 of World’s Weirdest Restaurants, a reality show on Food Network Canada, host Bob Blumer visited Cos Cha, an eating establishment in Tokyo where waitresses refer to patrons as “master” or “mistress,” blow on customers’ food if it’s piping hot and, after their meals have cooled down some, spoon-feed it to them, one dollop at a time.

We know, we know: Get to the weird part.

Well, it turns out servers at Cos Cha pamper their clientele while dressed in matching French maid uniforms, complete with petticoats, pinafores and black knee-high stockings.

So-called maid cafés have been big in Japan since the start of the millennium, when the first one — the Cure Maid Café — opened in the Akihabara district of Tokyo in 2001. Although they have since become equally popular with tourists, maid cafés used to appeal primarily to otaku, a Japanese term given to people obsessed with fantastical forms of entertainment such as anime and manga, which often feature young, innocent-looking maids in prominent roles.

Besides schlepping plates to and fro, maids (and in certain cafés, guys posing as butlers) also administer massages, haircuts and — you heard right — ear cleanings. In turn, customers, who often arrive in costume themselves, are expected to behave appropriately. Touching staff members is strictly prohibited. So is snapping pictures of the maids while they scurry about.

 

On a recent Tuesday night in Winnipeg, Glenn Bailey and his 16-year-old daughter Kaelyn were trying to decide where to go for supper. The pair was “thinking Japanese.” They reached for Bailey’s phone and started poring through online restaurant reviews. After a few minutes, they settled on Dwarf No Cachette Café, in part because of its quirky moniker and also because so many people praised the St. Boniface locale’s take on dishes such as ramen and okonomiyaki.

What comments neglected to mention, however, was as of April, Dwarf No Cachette Café has operated as a full-on maid café every Tuesday.

Bailey and Kaelyn arrived there at 8:30 p.m. They were greeted at the door by a petite brunette with long bangs wearing a pastel-coloured maid’s outfit. The hostess, who introduced herself as Ichigo — “That’s Japanese for strawberry,” she explained — clasped her hands together, bowed, then led them to a table for two.

Bailey’s initial thought: “Uh, what the heck is going on here, exactly?”

After they were seated, Kaelyn — an anime fan who, despite being somewhat familiar with maid cafés, had no idea one existed in Winnipeg — ordered takoyaki, which her server/maid described as dumplings stuffed with bits of octopus. Bailey opted for curry rice and an appetizer listed on the menu as Shake Shake Fries.

“When our maid brought the fries out, she asked me what kind of seasoning I wanted,” Bailey says. “Then, as she was shaking (the seasoning) onto them, she did this little presentation that consisted of a Japanese song and dance.

“I was like, ‘Hey, I’m always open to new experiences so sure, why not? Bring it on.’ “

Yasuko Akimoto and her husband, Takekuni, opened Dwarf No Cachette Café at 157 Provencher Blvd. last July. (Asked about her resto’s peculiar tag for perhaps the gazillionth time, Akimoto says it roughly translates into “hiding place of dwarves” — a reference to the dozens of colourful gnomes and sprites discreetly positioned on shelves and sills throughout the cheery, well-lit room, which used to house highly regarded Step’N Out Sur Le Boulevard.)

Akimoto moved to Winnipeg from Tokyo 16 years ago to study linguistics at the University of Manitoba. Every summer she would return home to see friends and family. One of the things she liked to do most during her visits was hook up with buddies at different maid cafés.

“There is no such thing as tipping a waitress in Japan. But that doesn’t matter, the service is still best. And in maid cafés, even more so,” Akimoto says. “Going to a maid café isn’t just about eating dinner. You engage in conversation (with your maid); one of her main jobs is to entertain you… it’s very much a social outing.”

Akimoto toyed with the idea of turning her business into a maid café from time to time, as a nod to Winnipeg’s anime community. In March, one of her waitresses — Ashley Wakely, who studied in Japan for 10 months before graduating high school — asked her boss if that plan was ever going to see the light of day.

“After I said yes, she kept asking me, ‘When? When?'” Akimoto says.

On April 14, Dwarf No Cachette Café hosted its inaugural maid café event — a happening that, after it was announced on the restaurant’s Facebook page, was greeted with comments along the lines of “YEsss!!!,” “Whoaaaaa” and “Go with me to this…SOMEBODY!!!”

“We have three seatings: 2 p.m. to 5 p.m., 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. and 8 p.m. to 11 p.m.,” Akimoto says. “So far, the late slot has been the most popular — fully booked, every time.”

When we attended, maid café night went something like this: for the first hour, maids (including Wakely) hustled people’s orders back and forth from the kitchen. If they hadn’t been wearing frilly lace tiaras — or if an entire table of guests hadn’t shown up disguised as characters from the video game Halo — maybe, just maybe, we might have thought we were grabbing a bite at any of another 100 sushi palaces around town.

During the second hour, as diners were finishing up their main courses, the three maids invited willing participants to the front of the room to compete in a winner-take-all tournament of rock-paper-scissors. The back section of Dwarf No Cachette Café is a gift shop, loaded with goodies imported from the Land of the Rising Sun. Winners of the tourney were able to choose prizes, such as Hello Kitty key chains or Pokémon pencils.

Finally, after a victor was declared, the three maids performed a 20-minute dance routine, lip-syncing along to a soundtrack described by a person seated next to us as “anime’s greatest hits.”

“That last song was called Hare Hare Yukai; it’s from the show The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya,” says Cassidy Allison, 20, who showed up dressed as Hina Kagiyama, a character from The Touhou Project, a popular video game series. (Whispering so she doesn’t disturb the singing and dancing maids, Allison tells us she has so many costumes at home, she now devotes an entire closet to them.)

This was Allison’s fourth visit to Dwarf No Cachette Café. The first time, she was accompanied by members of the Winnipeg Anime Club, an organization involved in local events such as Chibi-Con and Keycon.

“Anybody who is fond of Japanese culture is very familiar with things like maid cafes,” she says. “When I was younger, I always had aspirations there would be one in Winnipeg someday, so I was super excited when I found out it was finally going to happen.

“But even without the maids, this place would still be ridiculously adorable. I absolutely love it; with all the charms and trinkets and stuff, you really think you’re in Akihabara.”

To find out more about Dwarf No Cachette’s maid café events, visit its Facebook page.

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca