Germany is known for its biergartens, full of busty maids serving sturdy men liters of bitter beer and platters of sausages glistening with grease. You’ll find plenty of pork products in Berlin’s trendy Tiergarten district, but not at Sehnsucht, named after the German word for “longing.” The restaurant bills itself as “the world’s first restaurant for anorexics.”
“It’s difficult to sell this concept,” the restaurant’s 33-year-old owner and former anorexic Katja Eichbaum explained to the newspaper Deutsche Welle. “People think this is a restaurant for the sick, so it scares them off.” I offer a different conclusion: perhaps the restaurant is having difficulty because its target audience doesn’t eat.
What is a restaurant for anorexics? Paradoxical as it may seem, the restaurant, which is owned, managed and staffed entirely by anorexics, actually serves luscious food.
“Looks good, tastes good,” the anorexic Chef Claudia told The Times. “That is, it probably tastes good.”
The goal is to entice anorexics to eat with beautifully prepared, delicious food. The waifish staff insists that anyone, anorexic or not, could dine at Sehnsucht.
While I’d imagine an extensive list of flavored waters, greaseless salads, and chocolate laxatives for desserts, the menu is comparable to any modern, upscale restaurant, albeit in smaller portions. Chef Claudia serves tiny rations of fatty food with whimsical, inedible names. The lobster bisque is billed as “hallo,” German for “hey,” and the surprising rack of lamb is “hei?hunge,” or “ravenous.” The menu avoids descriptions, making no mention of food.
When it comes to dining, anorexics are a particularly demanding audience, and Eichbaum clearly takes special care to cater to their every need. While Degas’s ballerinas might have made good inspirational art, Eichbaum avoids all pictures in favor of Zen-like inspirational phrases. Even the toilets are lined with alternating tiles inscribed with the mantras “courage,” “energy” and “love.”
Ignoring the pages of Vogue framed on the walls, weight limits or funhouse mirrors and scales in the bathrooms, Sehnsucht isn’t all that different from any other overpriced urban restaurant, even with the unusually long list of calorie-free teas and ?ber-skinny waitresses. Even so, it seems that they tapped into their target audience a little too successfully, because Sehnsucht never made it out of the red. The restaurant may soon close its doors because, you guessed it, none of its customers ate anything. Next time Eichbaum chooses a restaurant’s target audience, perhaps the obese would be a better demographic.
