One Sandwich Short of a Picnic: Ridiculous Restaurants

Fact: Doctors in Riga have opened a medical-themed restaurant

Any of you out there have a fear of clinics? How about needles? A restaurant in Riga, Latvia might not be the place for you. This hospital-themed eatery is fully kitted out in red and white hospital beds (complete with wheels) for tables and chairs, and waitresses donning standard nurse uniforms. If you’ve always struggled handling a knife and fork, the syringe and surgical tools they supply you with instead might just be the answer.

Eating in general is made a whole lot easier when you can opt to be spoon-fed by a member of staff, of course, the entire business might be a little tougher in one of their custom-made straightjackets. And if the thought of sitting in a hospital to eat your dinner (while drinking out of IV bags and test tubes) is a bit too unpleasant, move the party down the hall to the dentist’s room. Or better yet, sit down for a feast in the gynecologist’s. Unfortunately, the restaurant closed down in recent years, but fear not, weird restaurant-goers out there, the rest of the world has supplied you with more than enough eclectic eateries to keep your taste buds satisfied.

If you want to stick to the hospital theme, there’s always the Heart Attack Grill in Nevada, USA, which the founder started in 2005 with the intent of serving ‘nutritional pornography’, and food ‘so bad for you it’s shocking’.  Just as in Latvia, your nurses are your waitresses, your orders prescriptions, and you yourself are the patient. Unlike anywhere else in the world however, you can order a Single, Double, Triple or even Quadruple Bypass burger (which can hit up to 8000 calories), and customers can eat for free if they weigh more than 160kg (350lb), which they have to prove by stepping on a scale in front of a ‘nurse’ or ‘doctor’ before each meal. The list of customers that have indeed become cardio patients (of the real kind) is growing by the day – this place is not for the, err… faint-hearted.

If you’re the type of diner who would prefer the rush of adrenalin to clogged arteries, Dinner in the Sky could do the trick. Perched 150ft in the air, the Belgian invention for the wealthy adventure eaters out there provides patrons with a chance to dine with the birds. The crane is checked before each meal, and guests are rigorously strapped in before the ascent, after which you can enjoy the 2-hour meal (prepared at that height in the centre of the table), before touching down safely on solid ground. Paris and Brussels have had tasters of this unique experience, while New York and Niagara Falls are next on the list, but for a mere $15 000 they’ll send it over to your back garden for your very own private dinner party – if you can handle the neighbours’ stares.

What are some other ridiculous restaurants you know of? For more crazy Latvian facts, take a look at our True or False facts game!