Most Uncomfortable Dining Experiences Ever

If you ask someone to describe their perfect restaurant meal, you expect them to smile fondly and use words like "delicious," "romantic," "tasty," "fun," "comforting," "spicy," or maybe even "casual." But one adjective you usually won't hear is "uncomfortable" because as a rule most restaurants try extremely hard to avoid that. Unfortunately, as you will see, in the process of aiming for "unique and memorable," some restaurants nevertheless land squarely on uncomfortable — and we're not talking about the chairs.

Customers may have traveled to these restaurants for an unforgettable dinning experience, but they probably got way more than they bargained for. These restaurants offer what we imagine to be the most uncomfortable dinning experiences ever, so be warned — read the fine print (and the reviews!) and make your reservations at your own risk. And if you're looking a restaurant that will make you squirm, we just might have some places for your bucket list.

Want to eat and make the "I can see my house from here" joke repeatedly? Dinner in the Sky might be what you're looking for. Just make sure you're absolutely, positively, completely not afraid of heights in any way whatsoever. Dinner in the Sky offers every one of its customers the table with the best view: with no walls, windows, or even floors to get in the way. Because that table is suspended from a crane several hundred feet in the air, and you're strapped into a chair hanging from it. Up to three chefs occupy the open central area of the table from where they can fill everyone's glasses, and serve their food. And there aren't any facilities up there, so if any unfortunate diner needs to use the bathroom, the whole contraption and everyone in it has to return to the ground to let them off, then wait until they're done. If you're even the least bit scared of heights, this is definitely an uncomfortable experience.

As restaurant concepts go, handcuffing customers then locking them in a cell doesn't seem like a winner. In fact you'd be forgiven for thinking there's been a mixup, and there must be a very comfortable prison somewhere nearby serving excellent food. Alcatraz E.R. offers diners the experience eating in a medical prison, as if that's something people would actually want to do. "Authenticity" takes a back seat when it comes to the food however, as "penis sausage," and "intestines" are unlikely candidates for a real prison's dinner menu. If you did pay this Tokyo theme restaurant a visit, you'd undoubtedly discover the most authentic part of the whole experience: the burning desire to escape at the first opportunity.

Hospitals are supposed to be sterile, but being surrounded by medical instruments is hardly a comfortable way to enjoy dinner. Hospitalis is a hospital-themed restaurant in Latvia, and along with waitresses wearing what look like sexy nurse Halloween costumes, you get to eat body part-shaped food using surgical instruments as utensils. The drinks even come served in IV bags, which is just all kinds of wrong. If you really want to get into the experience, you can opt to have yourself tied up in a straitjacket and have your meal fed to you by the sexy nurses. If you can sit next to that and not want to strangle yourself with your IV tube, congratulations! Catch the next flight to Latvia to enjoy. By the look of it, calling this place a restaurant looks like an optimistic effort to broaden the market appeal of a borderline hospital fetish club.

Regardless of the theme of the restaurant, everything is supposed to be pretty clean. But things have to get a little iffy when you're eating dinner with actual naked people, and that's just the first of the concerns that come to mind when you find out about The Bunyadi, where customers are encouraged (though not required) to leave their clothes and digital companions in a locker before being led to a table. The use of low light and a multitude of bamboo screens allows a semblance of discretion, but naked is naked. Living out the horror of all those teenage "OMG I'm naked in public" nightmares hardly sounds like a recipe for comfort. Aside from the potential for sexual misconduct, naked staff serving naked customers is hardly an introvert's paradise. And if the food weren't also mostly naked and cold (i.e. raw, pickled, or smoked) you'd have the risk of hard-to-explain burns to worry about as well.

Going out for a meal comes with a whole collection of potential issues: will you get a reservation? Will you find a parking space? Will your table be next to the bathroom? And that's before you even get to your seat. Get that far and you run the risk of saying something stupid to the waiter, spilling something on yourself, getting spinach in your teeth — the list goes on. One restaurant has found a new way to unsettle your dinner experience. You'll be eating in the dark. Opaque is a chain of restaurants with locations in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco that offers diners the experience of eating a meal in a completely dark room. The pitch on the website claims that by losing the ability to see you'll experience the food on a higher level, but while that might sound good on paper, the reality of constant spillages, lost food, eating with your hands because you can't do it with silverware, the increased likelihood of saying something stupid, not being able to find the bathroom without help, and a fairly substantial price tag, makes the whole event seem more like an overpriced theme park ride with food than a night out. About the only thing you don't have to worry about is getting spinach in your teeth ... at least until you get back outside anyway.

If you thought toilet humor was the preserve of pre-adolescent boys, then you are mistaken, because it apparently also works as a restaurant theme. And why not? it's not like the idea of eating from a toilet is abhorrent to most people or anything. Except that for some people it can't be, or else Modern Toilet probably wouldn't still be open. Perhaps this restaurant just survives on the business of those people who say "I'll try anything once" because it's hard to imagine anyone becoming a repeat customer when their food comes served in a small toilet bowl, with a side under a poop-shaped cover, and a drink served in a mini urinal. If you need a quirky way to lose weight, this place might be for you. If you need a surefire way to blow a first date, make this your destination, because watching someone eat out of a toilet is an image that doesn't leave much room for romance.

Pairing food with nudity isn't exactly a new thing. In fact, it's central to the (possibly) traditional Japanese practice of Nyotaimori, which at least doesn't require the diner to expose themselves in public. Unfortunately the same can't be said for the "tableware" at those occasions. Instead of ceramic, metal, or even glass dishes, the food is served on a naked woman. Specially trained to remain completely still for hours, the literally objectified woman lies on a table where she is covered with sushi that the diners sitting at the table gradually consume. It would be easy to get distracted by hygiene in this moment, and hygiene is definitely a problem in Nyotaimori restaurants, but the far bigger issue is the uncomfortable fact that a woman is behaving like an inanimate object so that a bunch of (probably, let's be honest) men can gradually expose her with their gluttony. Nyotaimori is actually most common outside Japan and can be experienced in the U.S.A. at places like Cheetah's Gentlemen's Club in New York, which at least seems like the most appropriate setting for such a misogynistic meal, if not a particularly palatable one. At least as you're sitting there squirming in the glare of sexual politics and serious food hygiene issues, you'll know that you aren't the only uncomfortable one at the table. The serving dish is right there with you.

There's nothing like a gimmick to make people pay for an uncomfortable experience. Take Finland's Snow Castle for example: tell people they'll be eating somewhere where the internal temperature never gets above 25 Fahrenheit, the floors and tables are covered in ice, and it falls down and has to be rebuilt every year, and they'll probably tell you to find somewhere else to go. But tell them it's a hotel and restaurant made of snow, and suddenly everything's different ... right? Not really. You wouldn't want to eat outside in 25-degree weather, so why is it different if it's inside? The air is still cold, your clothes are still bulky and awkward, and if you stay long enough, and drink enough beer, you'll eventually need to use the bathroom.

Swing by Bone Daddy's website, and you could be forgiven for thinking that it was a pretty ordinary barbecue restaurant. Bone Daddy's was even listed as one of the top 100 barbecue restaurants in America, so the food must be pretty good. But what makes Bone Daddy's uncomfortable has less to do with smoked meat and more to do with who serves it. Let's start with the name: if all you knew about the restaurant was that they served barbecue, it would be easy to assume the name was a reference to that. However look it up on Urban Dictionary, and the most family-friendly interpretation describes Bone Daddy as a casual reference to a friend, which is a bit weird. But that's an outlier. The other definitions are pretty consistent, usually refer to a man's attitude to women, and probably shouldn't be read out loud in a public place. Now consider that this particular restaurant could be described as the Hooters of barbecue, and you might start to see where it gets uncomfortable. Places like Bone Daddy's and Hooters are usually grouped under the title "breastaurant" owing to the fact that they almost exclusively employ young attractive women in skimpy uniforms to serve the food and drink. Unless you have no shame whatsoever, a visit to Bone Daddy's will always include one part barbecue, one part awkward sexualization, and two parts uncomfortable.

If a restaurant has a rude waiter who constantly insults customers, the management usually does everything possible to stop it. Unless that restaurant is Dick's Last Resort, where they made it a gimmick instead. Full of obnoxious servers getting in your face, throwing stuff at you, and screwing with you all through the meal, this place has all the charm of a kid's birthday party in McDonald's but without the excuse of being too young to know any better. If you like to pay for the privilege of being insulted, interrupted, and fed probably mediocre food, then this might be the place for you! If you want good food, polite and efficient service, or just a bit of peace and quiet, you might be happier almost anywhere else.