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KAOHSIUNG, Taiwan --Taiwanese restaurateur Eric Wang has given new meaning to the traditional revelers' cry of bottoms up. His eatery in the southern city of Kaohsiung delivers its food not on conventional plates and dishes, but in miniaturized Western and Asian style toilets, both the flush and non-flush variety.
For anyone missing the point, diners are encouraged to stir up mushy, earth-colored offerings like curry chicken rice and chocolate ice cream to conjure up -- well, the real thing.
Located in a downtown area with a variety of competing eateries, Marton -- the name means toilet in Chinese -- attracts its customers through its dazzling bathroom decor.
Walking in through an arched door, diners are greeted with a giant toilet bowl sitting between two urinals. White ceramic toilet seats comfortably accommodate their bottoms, and urinals grace the walls.
Giggling helplessly, high school student Chen Yi-lin gulps down a chocolate ice-cream sundae served in a miniature Asian-style squat toilet, and admits that she is smitten.
"This is fun," she says.
Wang, 26, opened the Marton last year after a roadside prototype -- a stand offering toilet-shaped ice cream cones -- achieved runaway success.
Now, he says, he has moved decisively upmarket.
"Diners come and walk away with the special experience," he said. "Many try to create more fun, stirring up curry and rice so it looks exactly like when you forget to flush the toilet. Then they gulp it down."
For all its scatological excess, the Marton is following in the noblest tradition of Taiwanese novelty restaurants.
Other successful ventures have purposely confined scores of contented diners to coffins or jail cells, or exposed them to full-scale pictures of Chinese dictator Mao Zedong, Taiwan's political nemesis until his death in 1976.
http://www.boston.com/news/odd/articles/2005/06/03/restaurant_offers_toilet_bowl_servings?mode=PF
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