2016.05.05 New York Post
Bare with us!
Almost 34,000 people have signed up for a chance to eat at the
Bunyadi, a pop-up restaurant that opens in central London next month and encourages patrons to dine in the buff.
The restaurant, touting itself as London’s first naked eatery, will serve lunch and dinner for three months to just 42 diners at a time. The space is divided into clothed and clothing-optional areas — with the “naked and pure” section attended to by semi-nude servers. Its location will only be disclosed to those lucky enough to nab reservations, presumably a way of eluding Peeping Toms.
There are locker rooms to store clothes and belongings, and to don a robe for modesty. Phones are forbidden, so this is one meal that folks (thankfully) can’t Instagram.
A dim atmosphere is also part of the Bunyadi’s back-to-basics design. Neither the kitchen nor the seating area will use electricity; food will be cooked over wood fires. There will be vegan and nonvegan tasting menus for $95 a head.
experience is meant to offer “true liberation,” according to organizer Lollipop, allowing buttoned-up urbanites to “enter a secret Pangea-like world . . . and revisit the beginning, where everything was fresh, free and unadulterated from the trappings of modern life.”
Ah, that explains the “handmade clay crockery and edible cutlery,” the woodsy furniture and the bamboo and wicker partitions between naked tables.
“I’m inspired by the movement to more natural, stripped-back things,” Lollipop chief Seb Lyall
told CNN.
Meanwhile, those who don’t want to strip down can decide how much of their robes they want to shrug off. Lyall speculated: “At the very least, they’ll probably go topless.”
“We believe people should get the chance to enjoy and experience a night out without any impurities,” Lyall said in a press release. “No chemicals, no artificial colors, no electricity, no gas, no phone and even no clothes if they wish to.”
The naked-restaurant mastermind is known for other publicity-grabbing stunts. Chief among them is ABQ, a “Breaking Bad”-themed bar that opened last year that’s run out of a trailer and mixes cocktails in chemists’ beakers. (It moves to Paris in May.)
But chew on this: The tens of thousands of folks on the Bunyadi’s waiting list may be in for a fully clothed disappointment.
The restaurant aims to feed 120 people a day over the three months that the pop-up is open — that’s about 11,000 customers total.
“There may be a lot of people who don’t get tickets,” a Bunyadi rep told The Post in an e-mail. “Tickets will be released [on a] first-come, first-served basis” to those on the waiting list, 2,000 at a time. If they are unclaimed, the next 2,000 will be notified and get a chance to claim their pass to the Garden of Eden.
That’s the naked truth.
