Looking for a unique dining experience during your visit to Taiwan? You may wish to visit the restaurant shown in the accompanying photo. What’s that, you say? That’s not a restaurant, that’s a plumbing fixture supply house? Au contraire—that is the Marton Theme Restaurant of Kaohsiung, Taiwan, so named because the name Marton resembles matong, the local word for toilet. The restaurant actively advertises that it serves the local epicures using tableware shaped like western toilets or the Japanese-style “squat toilet.” In fact, the decor of the entire restaurant is modeled after that of a lavatory.

Don’t be so quick to laugh. In the words of a later Roman emperor who was criticized for putting a tax on public urinals, “Pecunia non odet“—Money doesn’t smell. The Marton Theme Restaurant has been so successful owner Eric Wang opened a bigger branch just seven months after going into business..

The Japanese seem to be responsible for the light bulb or washlet or whatever it was that came on in Wang’s head. He says he got the idea from a Japanese comic with a robot doll who likes to eat excrement in ice cream cones. (I have no idea what comic he’s talking about, but I’m sure one of our faithful readers does.) To test out the idea, Wang first sold ice cream in toilet-shaped cones at street booths four months before opening the restaurant. He priced the cones up to one-third more than a normal ice cream cone and still sold as many as 1,000 a day.

What do the customers think?

“I think this is the most special restaurant I’ve ever been to. The menu also looks good and I’d like to try more next time,” says newcomer Cheng Hung-chi, who discovered the restaurant on the Internet and took her mother and brother with her.

Speaking of the menu, what dishes do discriminating diners favor at the Marton? According to Wang, they go for the curry hot pot, curry chicken rice, and chocolate ice cream because “they look most like the real thing.” And here I never thought one would be able to associate the word coprophagous with a restaurant—much less a Chinese restaurant. If this has whetted your appetite for more, here’s the full AFP-Jiji Press report with more photos from the Times of India, who were tickled by the idea that curry was the one of the eatery’s most popular dishes.

And while we’re on the subject of gastronomic delights in Asia, another AFP-Jiji bulletin reports that more than 100 people in Northern Thailand were hospitalized after eating crickets. Dr. Prayoon Kowit of the Ban Phai hospital said that traders had boiled, dried, bagged, and sold 170 kilograms of crickets on May 15. But Dr. Kowit noted that the only villagers who got ill from the crickets were those who found them so tantalizing they ate them right away. They suffered from diarrhea, dehydration, and low blood pressure. Those who cooked them first had no problems.

No cricket sushi for these folks, by Jiminy!