As an appreciator of fine and absurdly themed dining, I always pictured a stolen repas at the Hello Kitty Bistro Bianco like supping five-star French cuisine against a rolling and undulating velour and velveteen white and pink dining environment. Everything is a wink, a smile, and a cloying, stifled giggle -- tee-hee! -- with delightfully intricate doilies, baubles, and lacework accenting the saccharine and honeyed interiors. Pinks and pastels, clear plastic and plush, shimmering silvers, diamonds, sugar candies and lollipops raining down from the ceilings; we’re ensconced in joy, cuteness, and liquid velvet -- not unlike, say, feasting on a Pan-Seared Steak au Poivre inside a giant unicorn labia.



In reality, dear, dear reader, the Hello Kitty Bistro is not like a giant unicorn labia. Alas. Regrettably. It falls short. It falls short of the Platonic ideal unicorn labia dining experience I’m still imagining in my head.

But, hey, I went and ate there, and if we’re already here anyways, we might as well talk about it! We might as well discuss the time I, a near 40-year-old man, had lunch at Hello Kitty Bistro, did the “Look Around” function on my WeChat, and came off like a massive sexual predator to a roomful of women and children. Yes, it’s true!







The Background:

If you made me Wikipedia “Hello Kitty restaurant”, I could tell you the following information: The anthropomorphic white Japanese Bobtail cat with a red bow -- which is actually a “little English girl called Kitty White, from outside London,” no shit -- has long since made the foray into F&B and has dessert cafes in Thailand, Korea, and Japan, obviously, and lately a “Bistro” branch on Nanjing Pedestrian Street. They opened last year.

First things first, the Nanjing Pedestrian Street still exists (Jesus, really?), as does the Hello Kitty Bistro Blanco, on the 7th floor of this mall. It looks like this.



It has a lobby check-in waiting room thing in which you get your number. The place is pretty popular, especially for lunch, and you have to hang out in the lobby waiting area and have an awkward conversation with the very nice lady maitre d while you wait for a table.



“Do you... do you like... kitty?”

“I do. I DO like kitty. Believe it, sister.”

Up this regal, Cinderella-looking staircase is the main dining area: a bright white one-room number with red velvet dollhouse chairs, an open kitchen, a Hello Kitty cartoon projected on the walls, and a few Hello Kitty plush toys and cardboard cutouts artlessly placed throughout. It’s actually pretty sparse. It’s like someone Taobao’ed “HELLO KITTY DESSERT CAFE”, got the box in the mail, and then just assembled it wholesale into an empty room on the 7th floor of a mall.







I could have used a bit more whimsy. I could have used a bit less restraint. I was expecting to be sprayed down with unicorn sex juice and hit in the face with a big bag of icing sugar as soon as I got to the top of the stairs. I ascended to disappointment.

The Booze:



Hello Kitty Bistro is really more of a cafe than a cocktail bar, and they’ve got a lot of coffees and teas, or at least it looked like they might as I flipped furiously past them on the way to the alcohol section at the back of the menu. We started with a “Kitty” (40rmb), a “Krin” (40rmb), a “Red Eye” (40rmb), and the "Some Other Thing I Can't Remember" (40rmb), or as I have newly dubbed them, “The Fatman Trapped in a Dollhouse Drinks Combo Pack”.



Every single one of these was a wine spritzer. Every single one. I guess the “Red Eye” was Kirin beer and tomato drink, really, but it may as well have been a fuggin’ spritzer. I’m not going to talk about these drinks anymore.

The Food:

Pizza? It’s not like you can really mess up pizza, right?



You can mess up pizza. Of course you can, what am I saying. People mess it up all the time, the world over. Hello Kitty’s pizza comes in two sizes, costs more than my university diploma, and is served in the shape of a cat. It’s pretty… ugh, I don’t know. Like standard off-brand corner coffee shop pizza in Ningbo. It’s not total death, but it’s very much assembled from basic readily available supermarket sorts of ingredients. It’s exactly the kind of pizza my college roommate would make when he got super baked.

It’s not totally terrible, but you can really tell the ingredients came from the corner bodega using a Gas Club Card that Hello Kitty stole from their dad.



Steak? Don’t mind if I do. SmartShanghai's paying and this is the most expensive thing on the menu. It's not my first day, son. The other two options (2) that qualify Hello Kitty Bistro as a bistro is a lamb chop dish and another chicken dish. Three dishes total, that's it. Okay.

Now, the steak (168rmb) in the menu was a biggish looking cut of meat with the Hello Kitty logo seared like the bejeezus into the size of it. Pretty absurd. The steak that came out onto the kitchen looks like this…



Pffffth. It's two tiny, tiny lil’ cuts, not even big enough to sear the tiny logo of a really small company that specialize in manufacturing really tiny things into it. Other than that... umm... what to say...

For a brief moment in time, I existed on the same plane of reality with this steak and it was an uneventful moment, both positively and negatively, and when said moment had passed, the universe kept on moving and evolving, reality continued to progress and unfold, and life as we know it continued on in its very essential life-ness, as if the moment had been but a dream of a whisper that myself and this steak had just briefly shared together.

I also had the tiramisu.



If you read expat magazines, I can only imagine how fucking sick you are of fucking people "telling you about the tiramisu", so I'm going to do you a favor and just skip it. It was like 38rmb or something. It had a cat on it.

So that's the food.

Now. As a modern kind of guy going to modern kinds of restaurants and things, I'm looking for slightly more bang for my rmb-bucks. Good food, yeah fine. Great environment, yeah that's just great. Fantastic service, hey, good for you, you bunch of geniuses.

But what's your WeChat "Look Around" function game like? That's what I wanna know. Tell me what's going on with WeChat "Look Around" at your particular dining establishment. Oh, and I think I'm not the only one thinking along these lines:



Right?



RIGHT.



Behold: Here's what's going on with "Look Around" at the Hello Kitty Bistro.



And what does this mean?

I don't know. I have no idea. I didn't really think this through that far. I do know this: If you send the following...

[cat emoticon][hatchet emoticon][cat emoticon][hatchet emoticon] [cat emoticon][hatchet emoticon] [cat emoticon][hatchet emoticon] [cat emoticon][hatchet emoticon] [cat emoticon][hatchet emoticon]

...as a "greeting" to this person...



...they will not add you for a chat.

*

That's it Hello Kitty Bistro! 10/10. Boom, journalism.

Hello Kitto Blanco Bistro is at 7-8/F, 353 Nanjing Dong Lu, near Henan Lu.