Maid Café: Straight Outta Japan

The Manga and Anime Club (MAC), in collaboration with Burning Ice, held an interesting cosplay event at the Egg Factory on the 1st of February. Maid Café, a name that raised quite a few eyebrows, was organized to bring forth an intriguing aspect of the Japanese otaku culture. Otaku is a term used by the Japanese for people with obsessive interests, particularly over the anime and manga fandom.
Extremely popular in Japan, maid cafés (or their gender-equivalent butler cafés) are a subcategory of cosplay restaurants where the waitresses and waiters dress up and act like servants, and treat the customers as masters and mistresses as in a private home, rather than the usual treatment as mere café patrons.

The male servers were dressed as butlers while the female servers cosplayed French maids, as customary, and were initially set to cater to the diners at Oh Me Oh Slice. However, especially with the 11pm perm extension for first years, the crowd turned up in numbers higher than expected, and the organizers expanded their service to the diners at Egg Factory as well.
As opposed to the regular restaurant service, a maid café provides a far more personal touch, with servers interacting with the customers and giving them a treatment akin to royalty.

 

“Most of the people eating here are our age, either friends or acquaintances – it helps preserve a friendly atmosphere. In India, there is a stigma around the word ‘maid’. In a certain sense, this event helps provide a new perspective to it,” says Protiti Dutta, the editor-in-chief for MAC.

Traditionally, maid cafés have a set of rules and a typical dress-code for those serving the people, which have become flexible over time. Crossdressing males as maids and females as butlers is a common occurrence too. For the event, those waiting the tables were attired either in shirts and trousers/skirts, or in dresses. Head gears such as bows and masks were not uncommon either, as the servers accessorized with what resonated with their personality.

A unique and fascinating event of its kind, Maid Café attracted several students, and was undoubtedly something quite spectacular.

— Tejal Khullar for MTTN

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