Imitating the Restaurant of Mistaken Orders

“YOU may think it’s crazy: a restaurant that can’t even get your order right. All our servers are people living with dementia. They may or may not get your order right. However rest assured that even if your order is mistaken, everything on our menu is delicious and one of a kind. This, we guarantee. ‘It’s OK if my order was wrong. It tastes [very] good anyway.’ We hope this feeling of openness and understanding will spread across Japan and through the world.”

The preceding paragraph describes astutely what the Restaurant of Mistaken Orders is all about.

This unique restaurant is in Arakawa City, Higashi-Ogu, Tokyo, Japan. Shiro Oguni, the restaurant’s creator, came up with this concept after his experience with a group home where people with dementia live. His aim is to spread dementia awareness and to make society just a little bit

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more open-minded and relaxed with people who have dementia. The restaurant was launched on Sept. 18, 2017. By the way, the startup funds for it came from crowdfunding.

In their introductory video, Oguni said: “Dementia is so widely misunderstood. People believe you can’t do anything for yourself and the condition will often mean complete isolation from society. We want to change society to become more caring and easygoing. So, dementia or no dementia, we can live together in harmony.”

The restaurant’s name allows customers to enter with an open mind. Much more, they expect mistakes and are okay with it. It creates an air of easygoing acceptance. Statistics for the year 2019 show that 37 percent of the orders were mistaken, but 99 percent of the customers said they were happy with their experience at the restaurant — even with the mistakes. Ninety-five percent felt that the restaurant could help promote an understanding of dementia.

With a super aging society like Japan, it is predicted that dementia would affect 1 in every 5 people by 2025.

Cara Mia’s ‘dementia’

On the local front, one company exhibited messing up customers’ orders on Mother’s Day. I would not dare call it “dementia” as it gives a bad meaning to the affliction. I would rather call it “corporate greed.”

Why corporate greed? Cara Mia Cakes & Gelato took more orders than they could handle on Mother’s

Day. They accepted cake and ice cream deliveries fully knowing that they could not deliver them at all — at the expense of the buying public.

This is not only greed but perhaps even fraud. Cara Mia accepted payments for orders that were not delivered at all.

Here is one example from many. On May 8, Saturday, a certain customer, ABC, ordered online through the Cara Mia website a cake and a pint of gelato for their Mother’s Day celebration. ABC ordered Chocolate S’mores (a refrigerated cake), a combination of Coffee Mudslide and Mango Cream Pie (premium gelato flavors), and a greetings’ inscription on the cake itself (which was subject to a separate fee). The delivery time, as set by Cara Mia, was between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. of May 9, Sunday, Mother’s Day.

ABC’s family would be having a merienda cena Mother’s Day celebration with the “inscribed” cake and ice cream/gelato at around 4:30 p.m., just in time for the projected delivery from Cara Mia. However, at 5 p.m., there was still no delivery. At around 5:30 p.m., the delivery man from Cara Mia arrived. He had the cake but no ice cream. He promised to deliver the ice cream within 30 minutes since he would get it from Cara Mia-SM Southmall after the cake deliveries were done.

The delivery guy came back at 7 p.m. with the ordered gelato. When ABC opened the container, it did not look like ice cream at all but a sort of smoothie. It was nearly completely melted. Worse, the cake was not Chocolate S’mores; it was Midnight Dream. Even worse was the absence of the supposed Mother’s Day greetings.

ABC sent a text message to Cara Mia to relay the messed-up order, to which they replied: “Hi sir, I apologized po for what happen [sic] po, pasensya na po, na-call na po ng manager namin ‘yung branch, tatawagan po kayo agad po sir.”

The call from Cara Mia-SM Southmall never came. The apologies never materialized. The undelivered, yet paid for, inscription service, was neither corrected nor refunded.

The cake shop having its roots in the famed Amici di Don Bosco, I consider these actions of Cara Mia as “unchristian.”

Cara Mia is definitely not a restaurant of mistaken orders. It is a cake and gelato shop seemingly stinking of greed and fraud.

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