Ghost Izakaya

A friend of ours had a birthday dinner at Yurei, a restaurant a ghost theme (someone else's blog post about it here with more pictures).

To get to the restaurant, you pass the ghost with the skull face and head to the stairs. At the bottom of those stairs is this:

Always a good sign.

The inside is just as cheesy and over the top as you would imagine. All over the restaurant are toy spiders that are noise-activated to drop from the ceiling and then slowly crank themselves back up.

It really does have a pretty good ambiance, if you like Halloween-esque camp.

The tables are also equipped with some disembodied hands, inexplicably well manicured. Seriously, the nails are perfect.

Trivia: one of those hands belongs to Husband who
didn't know he was getting in the way of my photo.

Wall mural! Spooooooky.

Sort of...not really.

The whole dining area is lit by lanterns and blacklight.

The blacklight makes everyone visible mostly by collars and cuffs.

One of the courses served to us was a mysterious small skewer of fried and breaded round things. They turned out to be quail eggs, except one per table was booby trapped. By "booby trapped" I mean it was filled with wasabi. The winner(?) was apparently then dead, and was awarded a death headband. (I think the triangular hat is part of traditional burial attire, but I'm not 100% certain. All the waitresses were wearing them.)

The birthday girl poses with her Santa hat, disembodied hand from the table, and two guys that just barely managed not to wear exactly the same thing (one shirt is red, the other is orange...not that you can tell under a blacklight).

This about sums up the night.

Also, people having birthdays are presented with a brain decorated with a hypodermic needle (real!) and a sparkler. Sadly, it is not Jell-O and we couldn't eat it. The scoop of ice cream under the candle is a little off, too – it's one of those ornery magical re-lighting candles. No matter how much you blow it out, it comes back until you drop the ice cream on top of it. Or so I've learned.

Most of the decorations are silly and cheesy, but I kid you not, this is the 3-D wallpaper in the very, very small bathroom.

Usually when someone says, "that bathroom is scary," it's because the area is dirty and neglected, not because it's well maintained but THERE ARE FACES IN THE WALLS.

We'll be back again.