The Bunyadi, the city’s first “naked restaurant”, opened this month in London and now has a reported 30,000 people on the waiting list! Its a market that many thought would never happen and leads to a lot of questions!
Amongst so of the house rules there are no clothes, no mobile phones and no food preparation that requires electrical appliances (all cooking is done with fire), while the food is free of modern preservatives and the furniture is hand-carved. But maybe be best of all is the staff uniforms…
“For logistical reasons, our waiting staff will be covering their bits and bobs,” says Lyall. “If you’re sitting and someone is serving you, the height of your face and certain parts of their bodies is kind of the same. It’s something that didn’t occur to us at first, but a customer pointed it out in an email. We were like: ‘Woah, OK. That’s interesting … one of our potential customers has thought about it, so we should think about it.’ That’s the way we let the concept develop.”
Apparently it was easy to employ staff and even had their new employees approach them but it seemed that the council needed a little bit more convincing says Seb Lyall, the Bunyadi’s founder.
“We briefly thought they might have a problem with it, but it all seems to be fine at the moment,” he says. “What we’re doing is totally legal and ethical. After all, being naked in the UK is perfectly legal, even on the street. So, why wouldn’t we be allowed to do that in a confined, private space?” (The law states that it is not an offence to be naked, provided there is no intention to upset or shock.)
For more Information on The Bunyadi’s, its menu and more on concept visit their website here — The Bunyadi, the city’s first “naked restaurant”,
Photograph: William West/AFP/Getty Images
