Tattoos Not on the Menu at Tokyo’s Nude Restaurant

Many of the trends in fine dining can seem a little strange at first. Just think of how people reacted the first time they were served a $75 entree featuring pig face and an asparagus foam. The most recent trend raising eyebrows around the dining world has nothing to do with the food on the place but is instead focused on the way the food is consumed—nude dining. That’s right, people are stripping down and eating fancy meals in the same “outfit” I use to consume a bowl of cereal at 3:30 in the morning. But before you get too excited about hitting up Tokyo’s The Amrita to experience nude dining you better make sure that you don’t have any tattoos—ink is banned from the restaurant.

If you’re still a virgin canvas you may still not be in the clear to dine at the hyped eatery; they are also turning away older and overweight patrons from dining au naturel. According to the restaurant’s website people that are over the age or 60 and people who are more than 15 kilometers over the “average weight” will not be allowed to enter the restaurant, according to Rocket News.

This is disgusting. And yes, I’m not simply talking about eating in a room full of people in paper underwear. Banning people from a restaurant because of their age, weight or because they have tattoos is completely unacceptable. And yet, according to Eater, the pop-up restaurant is fully booked.

Tattoos have always been a bit of a tricky topic in Japan. As Americans it’s easy for us to just think about all of the amazing artists and the beautiful tradition of Japanese tattooing and assume that tattoos are celebrated in Japan. This is not the case. Due to their association with the criminal underworld were incredibly taboo until very recently. Most traditional spas banned tattooed people from entering them until very recently as there have been calls for them to ease these restrictions. It’s a shame, but not entirely unexpected, that tattoos would not be allowed at a nude restaurant in Tokyo.

Here at Inked we like to fight for the cause whenever we see people with tattoos being excluded or discriminated against. It simply isn’t right to judge a person based on their body art and as a society we should be way beyond that. Now, that being said, I don’t think any of us tattooed people are really missing out on anything here. Do you really want to drop a couple of hundred bucks to eat in a room filled with awkward people in paper underwear? I sure don’t, especially when there are somewhere around 1,000 amazing ramen spots in Tokyo alone.