Dine naked or eat out of a toilet bowl in World's Weirdest Restaurants

Ever wonder what it's like to dine naked? Would you eat out of a miniature toilet bowl? How about a meal at a mental institution? For many people, eating out can get predictable, as the choice is mainly based on budget or location. But when it gets boring, weird restaurants can be a welcome change, no matter how strange the dining experience. If the idea of extreme culinary adventure is too outrageous for you to try out yourself, you can begin vicariously with "World's Weirdest Restaurants," hosted by culinary adventurer, chef and seven-time Guinness World Record holder Bob Blumer. The 13-part show takes you to off-the-wall eateries packed with crazy characters and extreme cuisine across U.S., Canada, Japan, Taiwan, Germany, Amsterdam, Czech Republic, England and many places in between. Among Blumer's favorites were an Izakaya restaurant where macaque monkeys serve you your beer, and a New York City pop-up restaurant where all of the diners are naked. Blumer explained that restaurants could be weird in terms of the food, the environment, and even the proprietors. "We did everything from restaurants that were, you know, really big restaurants with whole management teams, all the way down to little restaurants where sort of one person was the cook, the entertainment, and the dishwasher," Blumer said in a telephone interview with reporters. "Mostly, it’s the environment. Occasionally, occasionally the food, but it’s really the theme of the restaurant or just the wackiness of the proprietor and what they do," said Blumer, noting that at one restaurant, the customers were dogs. In Japan, Alcatraz gives you the experience of being imprisoned while dining, complete with dishes that look like brains and medical instruments. Blumer said that in some restaurants, the food is thematically connected to the venue, while others would have a crazy environment, but serve typical bar food. "Most of these restaurants were about weird environments as opposed to weird food. And I think what attracts people is just that it’s, you know, we go to restaurants so often that every once in a while you just want to shake it up and experience something different. And some of these things...are pretty extreme," Blumer said. On the other hand, some weird restaurants can also be practical, such as one in San Francisco which is a coin laundromat, a restaurant, and a comedy club. "So you basically go and do your laundry and then have dinner and watch comedy while your laundry is washing and drying," Blumer said. Japan has the most number of weird restaurants, including over 2,000 restaurants with waitresses dressed as French maids. For Blumer, this has to do with repression in society, which requires people to be formal and proper on the exterior, while a lot goes on internally. "I think there is a fair degree of escapism that is involved in these restaurants where people like to get out of that sort of normal, polite world and go into a fantasy world for a short period of time," Blumer said. While people are drawn to weird restaurants because of the novelty, Blumer said they aren't just passing fads. He cited Taiwan's infamous yet very successful Modern Toilet, where curry is served out of miniature toiliet bowls. "In fact, it’s a franchise. Like it’s so popular that there are several of them," he said. Blumer, who has been to around 130 weird restaurants so far, will try anything, including sauteed killer bee larva. "Someone is always pulling something out of somewhere and daring me to eat it because they think I’m Andrew Zimmerman," he said. Still, being exposed to so much weirdness hasn't rubbed off on Blumer, who hasn't even contemplated on what would be a fun restaurant to run. What he does know, however, is some great ideas aren't as great as you might think. "If any of you are thinking that, ‘Hey, well, that nudist restaurant would be a great idea to run,’ don’t think that because nudists, as evidenced by the my visit to this particular pop-up nudist restaurant, nudists are the last people in the world you want to see naked," Blumer said. While traveling, they came across quite a few places that were as weird as their owners. For instance, one woman in Brighton, England designed kinetic hats, one of which had a train that ran around it. "Another one was a fishbowl hat with fish inside it and then she would sing in-between cooking and serving. She would sing songs on this little organ and the one song she sang was “I’ve Got a Goldfish Bowl on my Head," Blumer said. This woman's restaurant was so tiny that a diner could touch all four walls with outstretched arms. "We found a lot of places like that where it’s just a one-man or one-woman operation and their eccentricity really comes across," said Blumer. You can rely on this show to serve up eccentricity, whether it's culinary speed dating, ninja waiters, blindfolded dining, or a seven-course meal all made of pudding. "World's Weirdest Restaurants" airs every Monday at 9 p.m. beginning January 7 on TLC. — Carmela G. Lapeña/BM, GMA News