New crap!

“Out There: Toilet Eatery Bowls Diners Over
Sunday, June 05, 2005

Foodies are feeling a little "flushed" about a new restaurant in Taiwan that serves them food in pint-sized toilet-bowl dishes.

And, yes, the food is designed to look like something that belongs in pint-sized toilet-bowl dishes.

Restaurateur Eric Wang's theme eatery, called "Marton" — named after the Chinese word for "toilet," matong — has become quite the popular one in the southern city of Kaohsiung, Taiwan's second-largest, since its opening last year.

You see, at Toilet, the food isn't served on boring old plates. No, no, no. The meals "bowl" diners over as they arrive at the table in miniaturized Western and Asian-style porcelain thrones.

And Wang doesn't stop with the theme. The venue is a bottomless pit of toilet tricks and treats.

Nestled in the teeny-tiny toilet bowls are squishy offerings like curry chicken rice, chocolate ice cream and anything else that reminds one of, well, the real thing.

Patrons seem to love it.

Giggling helplessly, high school student Chen Yi-lin recently gulped down a chocolate ice-cream sundae served in a miniature Asian-style squat toilet, and admitted that she is smitten.


"This is fun," she said.

Located in a downtown area with a variety of competing eateries, Marton attracts its customers through its dazzling bathroom decor.

Walking in through an arched door, diners are greeted with a giant toilet bowl sitting between two urinals. Predictably, patrons are comfortably seated on white ceramic toilet seats.

Wang, 26, opened Marton last year after a roadside prototype — a stand offering toilet-shaped ice cream cones — achieved runaway success.

Now, he says, he has moved decisively upmarket.

"Diners come and walk away with the special experience," he said. "Many try to create more fun, stirring up curry and rice so it looks exactly like when you forget to flush the toilet. Then they gulp it down."

For all its excretory excess, Marton is following in the noblest tradition of Taiwanese novelty restaurants.

Other successful ventures have purposely confined scores of contented diners to coffins or jail cells, or exposed them to full-scale pictures of Chinese dictator Mao Zedong, Taiwan's political nemesis until his death in 1976.

First story”

“You have way more time on your hands than me.....

Gross.”

“Looks like crap, tastes like crap...”

“I wonder if they have fourtune cookies that look like TP....”