On a fine morning in September 2017, a one-of-a-kind restaurant was launched in Tokyo, Japan. The staff, donning crisp white uniforms, bowed down and greeted the customers waiting outside before kindly inviting them to try cuisines at their eatery. A video shared by the restaurant showed people giving orders and staff jotting everything down with big smiles on their faces. One woman ordered an iced coffee. An elderly server noted the order on her clipboard and chuckled because she did it “perfectly.” Another staff asked a customer sitting in a different spot if she brought the "right" order and the customer wholesomely replied, "It's perfect." It was perfect, but not "right" because this "restaurant can't get your orders right," as they have stated on their official page. But unlike most eateries around the world, no one made a fuss about it as this place celebrates “mistakes,” which is why it is called “The Restaurant of Mistaken Orders.”
The Restaurant of Mistaken Orders is a 12-seat pop-up restaurant in the Sengawa suburb of Tokyo. Here customers don’t demand orders to be right, because they know that the servers here are people suffering from dementia. According to YourTango, these servers get their orders right in just 40% of cases, but surprisingly, the customer satisfaction is 99%. According to The Washington Post, the parent of a former owner of the cafe has dementia, and the new owner agreed to let them rent out the space each month as a dementia cafe. They work with the local government to reach out to dementia patients in the area.
Representative Image Source: Pexels | RDNE
Dementia is a neurodegenerative condition in which the brain ceases to function properly. Per The Washington Post, more than 6 million Japanese people have dementia, and the number is expected to grow to 7.3 million by 2025. The condition has no cure. With the orientating axis of the brain losing its balance, the patient is left to dwindle in uncertainty, often going through memory loss, loss of attention, and other symptoms. This is what happens with the servers at this restaurant who don’t deliver the orders correctly.
Representative Image Source: Pexels | Olly
Like the server who delivered the iced coffee on that day, others served their orders too. But soon enough, something unusual started happening inside the restaurant. “That’s not what I ordered,” one customer told the server, “But hey, that’s okay,” he exclaimed. People who ordered burgers were getting noodles and those who ordered yakisoba got vegetable tempura. Yet, the ambiance of the restaurant seemed to be perfectly cheerful. People sitting on tables seemed happy. They were clicking selfies with servers. One customer told a 90-year-old server that she looked so youthful. The old woman giggled and explained, “I didn’t know if I could do it. But I came. And it feels so wonderful.”
Representative Image Source: Pexels | Akane Zen
Explaining the reason behind this wholesome idea, the restaurant wrote on its website, “All of our servers are people living with dementia. However, rest assured that even if your order is mistaken, everything on our menu is delicious and one-of-a-kind. This, we guarantee. We hope that this feeling of understanding will spread across Japan and throughout the world.”
Although the servers are all patients, the vibe here is fantastic. Plus, the restaurant offers music too. In the clip shared by the restaurant, Kazuo Mikawa can be seen introducing his wife Yasuko who was diagnosed with dementia. After the diagnosis, she left a lot of things she loved to do, like playing piano. She often said that there wasn’t a point in living anymore. Kazuo urged her to take up piano once again and they started playing together. With Yasuko on piano and Kazuo on cello, they now entertain the restaurant’s customers with soothing music. “It is important as a society that we support each other. We all have something to contribute,” a staff member said in the movie, as the restaurant exploded into thunders of applause for Yasuko.
The restaurant takes care that its servers are well-supported. Table numbers and order forms are color-coded for their ease. “A lot of elderly people are either in nursing homes or are just sort of shut away in their homes, so I hope that our initiative will give people with dementia something to look forward to,” Yui Iwata, who helps run the café, told The Washington Post. “If people get a deeper understanding, it would become easier for people with dementia to go out, as well.”
Over the years, the incredible cafe has won numerous awards. In a 2019 promotional movie, restaurant producer Shiro Oguni said, “We want to change society to become more easy-going so, dementia or no dementia, we can live together in harmony.” Oguni’s efforts are paying off and people are loving it too. In the same movie, a customer said, “I think there should be more places like this.”
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Pictured: A healthy practice?
Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.