High-end dining just got a lot higher.

Just when you think going out to eat is losing its magic, these 10 oddly themed restaurants push the envelope and really get you your money’s worth. For some of them, food is secondary to the ambiance, or not even part of the picture. For others, the tastes of the menu items are piqued by the complementary atmosphere. Whatever you’re into – cats, ninjas, or handcuffs – a few of these restaurants are sure to make it to your bucket list.

Yellow Treehouse Café, New Zealand

The Yellow Treehouse offers a unique setting that channels the excitement of your tree-climbing days. Patrons of the restaurant dine in an illuminated pod-shaped structure perched 10-meters high in a Redwood tree. The pod can hold 30 guests at one time. As for the food, it stays grounded – all dishes are fresh, seasonal, and adapt to clients’ needs.

Cabbages & Condoms, Bangkok

As its namesake suggests, the food at Cabbages & Condoms is “guaranteed not to cause pregnancy.” The restaurant was created to support the Population and Community Development Association, an organization that provides sex/AIDS education and awareness. The garden restaurant is an introduction to Thai food – in only the safest way possible – and instead of mint favors on your way out, you’re given a box of condoms.

Calico Cat Café, Tokyo

Imagine going to a café that only serves cat food, but there’s a chance that it’s too crowded to get a seat. The Calico Cat Café in Tokyo is just that popular. The café caters to your love for coddling and feeding cats sans the commitment. Patrons are asked to sanitize their hands and remove their shoes upon entering and to abide by set rules: do not hold or stroke a cat if it resists you, do not wake a napping cat, do not hold cats with scarves around their necks (they are too young), and do not bring cat nip or cat food to the café. For $9 per adorable hour, the café is a bargain. Only, you’ll leave hungry.

Ithaa Undersea Restaurant, Maldives

The magical Ithaa Undersea Restaurant is the first of its kind in the world. The restaurant is located 5 meters (16 feet) under water off the Conrad Maldives Rangali Island and serves contemporary Asian-inspired European cuisine. The restaurant is encased in R-Cast acrylic and can host 14 people at one time, offering a 270° panoramic underwater view.

Unsicht-Bar, Cologne and Berlin

Heighten your other senses by taking away one very important one: sight. The Unsicht-Bar, with locations in Cologne and Berlin in Germany, uses the dark to strip patrons of their vision and take them on a culinary adventure that requires they focus more on taste, temperature, texture and smell. All light is forbidden, including that coming from watches and cellphones. The restaurant’s waiters are also either blind or visually impaired. The food, which is described enigmatically to leave an element of surprise, is served in a context-appropriate manner, avoiding a confusion of flavors or a potential mess. The flavors are simple, but profound in that they are enjoyed in an entirely new way – without visual prejudgment.

Ninja New York, New York City

Japanese cuisine just got more interesting. At Ninja New York, diners are wowed, and often at the edge of their seats, with ninjas jumping around, pop rocks on sushi rolls, smoke machine action, magicians, and an overall festive and upbeat atmosphere. The restaurant’s décor aspires to mimic a ninja village from the feudal days, providing patrons with a sense of what it was like back when.

Chill Out, Dubai

As if Dubai has not enough marvels as is, the city offers a unique way to, well, chill out. Chill Out is an architecturally fascinating refrigerator lounge with special lighting and design works that highlight the innovativeness of the frozen structures. Before entering the bar, Patrons are offered thermal clothing – parka, shoes, and gloves – and are then led to the Eskimo oasis. A complimentary mocktail or hot chocolate welcomes you.

Devil Island Prison Restaurant, China

This restaurant was initially conceptualized to scare people from a life of crime. Upon entering this restaurant, patrons are allocated a number, photographed, fingerprinted, and optionally handcuffed. The interior of the restaurant is designed after a prison, with sliding jail doors, metal floors, and rusty iron bars. Patrons dine in a prison cell and are served by waiters dressed in black-and-white striped inmate uniforms. Food includes fried, coffin-shaped bread.

Dinner In The Sky, Worldwide

Suspended 50-meters high by a crane, diners at Dinner in the Sky can host an event practically anywhere. The table is equipped with 22 seats, one chef, one waiter, and one entertainer. Dinner in the Sky operates in more than 15 countries, including the U.S., Canada, Australia, and South Africa. The event can be hosted for up to 8 hours, with the time fragmented – people can come and go at whatever interval of time. As for a bathroom break, have no fear, the crane will lower for relief without interrupting the experience for more than a few minutes.

Marton Theme Restaurant, Taiwan

Originally serving chocolate ice cream in toilet-shaped containers, Marton Theme Restaurant has certainly gained quite the fanfare over the years. There are now Marton restaurants across Taiwan and the company has recently changed the name of its restaurants to “Modern Toilet Restaurant,” all of which offer a full menu that can be enjoyed whilst sitting atop a toilet.

Images: Jeremiah Ro, Meredith P., Carsten Lorenzten, Karendotcom127, Wonder Bus Tours Dubai, Smart Travelers

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ColumnHow do you say “cheers” in Hungarian?

“Normally they have rooster testicles, but I think they’re out of them today.”

Right.

We were staring at the wide array of meats behind the glass, busily snapping photos of everything from beef lungs to goose liver, knowing perfectly well that meat photos aren’t necessarily the most appetizing of food porn. With several floors of fresh produce and more meat than you can handle, the Great Market Hall, the largest indoor market in Budapest, has plenty of it, and Carolyn Banfalvi, owner of Taste Hungary, a Budapest-based company that offers food, wine and market tours, was taking us on a quick run through to make sure we knew all about fried fat and the importance of duck meat.

When you want to explore food culture, the market is often a good place to start. It is here that I learned that in Hungary, bacon is a big deal, the Hungarian countryside is full of fruits from apricots to blackberries and because wild mushroom picking is a popular pastime, there’s a “mushroom office” in many markets, where you can take your mushrooms to get checked, just to make sure you’re not eating anything poisonous.

Food is a central component of my plans anytime I travel, so it was no surprise that I was attempting to take in an entire food culture in five days.

“What is a classic Hungarian dish that we should eat?” I asked our apartment host Krisztina, a fashionable and savvy young Hungarian that was intent on giving us a long list of “underground” places to explore.

“Well, there is of course goulash, but it’s so heavy and not a summer dish, so please don’t eat it,” she responded.

“We will certainly not,” I responded. Always take the advice of a local.

Which is exactly how I ended up at a taco bar drinking fröccs.

A few nights earlier, Krisztina and her boyfriend Vandy had taken us out to explore the local ruin bar scene. What started as people taking over abandoned buildings, mostly in the Jewish quarter, and setting up makeshift bars, has turned into quite the scene, the kind of place where you’ll pick out a few tourists, but mostly you’re surrounded by hip Hungarians that ride single speeds and talk film and art. For the most part, they’re in courtyards, with packed seating and a mixture of low lighting and funky fixtures. My kind of place.

“So what do we order?” I asked.

“Fröccs,” said Vandy.

I quickly scribbled it down in my notebook, attempting to correctly pronounce it about five times first. Note: Hungarian is hard. Fröccs is a popular drink combining wine and soda water, mixed with varying proportions depending on how much you’re feeling like drinking, and for summer it’s perfect.

“Egészségedre!” Vandy and Krisztina pronounced, holding up their glasses.

More pronunciation repetition and scribbling in the notebook; it’s important to know how to say “cheers” in multiple languages after all.

Goulash may not have been on the list of recommendations but at least now I was well aware of how the cool urban crowd was spending their evenings. Budapest has a convivial culture, sitting in open courtyards in the summer and hunkering down in cozy basement bars in the winter. On Kazinczy street there is a handful of them, and you could spend an entire evening going from courtyard to courtyard, checking out the garden decor at Szimpla to sitting in a hammock chair at Köleves Kert. The winding cobblestone street is filled with bikes, parked up for the evening and entrances decorated with hanging lights.

“It’s two different worlds,” said Vandy, referring to the difference that the season and weather has on drinking habits, as he poured us a shot of Unicum. “You can’t leave Budapest without trying this!”

He was referring the the classic Hungarian herbal bitters, that is such a part of Hungarian culture that I later saw sample shots of at the airport at 8 in the morning. Just for the record, 8 is too early for herbal bitters. But at midnight in a ruin bar, it’s the perfect night cap. Just as tacos are the perfect street food.

Given my personal taco obsession, it came as no surprise that I would somehow end up eating them, even in the middle of Central Europe, but the beauty of globalization is that even in Hungary you can eat chicken paprikash for lunch and tacos for dinner. Sometimes exploring a food culture reminds you of how small the world has become. But because the Hungarians are good at preparing meat – when I asked Carolyn if there were any vegetarians in Hungary she said, “well, just a few” – the tacos were excellent.

Bacon, tacos, herbal bitters, the popularity of pickles and the large amount of hip people on single speed bicycles… Budapest was almost starting to feel like Portland. With more Hungarian of course, and less vegans. Add to that the extensive culture of cafes and the city is one continuous experience of eating, drinking and talking with people.

As a Hungarian proverb goes, “Good coffee should be black like the devil, hot like hell and sweet like a kiss.” And that’s exactly what you get in the multitude of kávéház that line the city streets. A double espresso and a classic Hungarian pastry will do good things at any time of day.

Jó étvágyat!

Editor’s note: This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’s weekly column at EcoSalon, Foodie Underground, discovering what’s new and different in the underground food movement, from supper clubs to mini markets to the culinary avant garde.

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In a down economy, we’ve seen lots of underground food trends take off. Limited budgets have forced people to get creative, both with what they buy and what they make at home. Just look at the rise in DIY markets; people are clamoring for goods that support their neighbor instead of the supersized box store down the street. Spend a weekend at farmer’s market and you’ll quickly be saying to yourself, “what recession?”

But it’s not just underground movements that are reaping the benefits of an economy that forces us to be on the lookout for anything that falls under the category of “less is more.” An article in last week’s Wall Street Journal posits that New Yorkers’ obsession with cupcakes has become one of the drivers behind the city’s improved economy. Cupcakes, really?

“People still want a cupcake,” said Pam Nelson, owner of Butter Lane, to The Wall Street Journal. “I think it’s kind of an indulgence and the price point is still low. For three dollars people can buy something for themselves instead of spending 100 bucks on a dinner and still feel like they’re treating themselves.”

Cruise on over to the Butter Lane website, and you’ll get a dose of delightful French music and salivating shots of baked goods – it’s easy to see why people feel like they’re getting a treat. In fact cupcake stores are everywhere, there are entire blogs devoted to them, and DIYers know that the quick way to a food lover’s heart just might be with buttercream.

I for one am not a cupcake fan (sorry!), but the NYC cupcake phenomenon is interesting because it’s emblematic of a larger trend sweeping the nation: specialty food. Forget running a one stop shop, when it comes to the foodie movement, it’s all about playing to a niche market, as we learned last week looking at various bike delivery enterprises.

Chefs and even amateurs that know their stuff well are honing their skills on one or two products that can come in small, but well-worth-it doses, in everything from ice cream cookies to take and bake molten chocolate cakes. In an over consumptive society where our choices are often overwhelming, it’s nice to know that people still specialize, and that when they do, they do it well.

Have a local specialty food store – cupcakes or otherwise – that you love? Tell us about it! Either in the comments below or on Twitter, remember to use the #foodieunderground hashtag!

Editor’s note: This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’s column at EcoSalon, Foodie Underground. Each week, Anna will be taking a look at something new and different that’s taking place in the underground food movement, from supper clubs to mini markets to culinary avant garde.

Image: ginnerobot

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