The Place

Where do I start with this place? There is noexperience in my life I can compare to Robot Restaurant Tokyo. It’s a kind ofcolourful, high-octane, robot/human cabaret and one the trippiest 90 minutes I’veever had.

In a nutshell, there are five-tiered rows of seating around a central stage. There’s food and drink service. And there’s a changing schedule of themed shows from a mix of robot and human performers.

A visit to Robot Restaurant might leave you a littleshell-shocked. And you probably won’t ever want to visit again. But if you’reanything like me, you’ll be so glad that you had this crazy, unique, one of akind, Tokyo experience.

The Neighbourhood

The Shinjuku neighbourhood. It’s 15 minutes in a cab and 25 on public transport from Shibuya. Like Shibuya, this is a Soho style area of Tokyo, teeming with restaurants, shops, bars, cinemas and the like.

https://www.shinjuku-robot.com/

https://www.instagram.com/robotrestaurant/

A Good Shout for…

A never-to-repeat, never-to-forget taste of sci-fi Tokyo cabaret. With snacks and drinks.

The Best Bits

• Waiting in the bar before the show. People sat around casually while a guy dressed like a Daft Punk robot treated us to some guitar music. A taste of the weirdness to come.
• When I visited Robot Restaurant the scheduled performance was a kind of robot war. Massive robots on wheels came onto the stage. There were people dressed in the most OTT outfits. The lighting, the music, the energy of the performers, it was all off the scale. And I’m yet to experience a sensory overload like it.
• Getting a sense of how the Japanese like to spend their downtime. People might dismiss it as silly or childish or touristy. But that’s Tokyo for you. People like to work hard and play hard. And this is how they choose to play.