This restaurant served feces-flavored curry. Its adult film star owner meant it as a joke, but it stayed open by popular demand

In 2015, a small Tokyo restaurant called Curry Shop Shimizu offered what it advertised as “feces-flavored curry.” Its founder, Japanese adult film actor Ken Shimizu, said he designed the concept as a joke. Still, the restaurant unexpectedly remained open thanks to overwhelming demand.

Shimizu was already a well-known figure in Japan’s adult entertainment industry when he decided to test the limits of what people would eat for novelty. According to interviews he gave at the time, the restaurant began as a prank and a way to make people laugh. The joke originated from a common Japanese riddle: “Would you rather eat curry-flavored poo or poo-flavored curry?”

However, Shimizu also said he wanted to explore the boundaries of disgust and fascination in food culture. He claimed to have always been curious about what feces might taste like and wanted to replicate that experience without actually serving anything unsanitary or unsafe. As bizarre as the idea sounded, Shimizu insisted the curry contained nothing inappropriate.

Instead, it was carefully engineered to mimic the pungent aroma, bitter undertones, and sulfurous quality people associate with human waste, all while using perfectly edible ingredients.

The pungent recipe

Once perfected, Shimizu’s recipe combined bitter melon, cocoa powder, senburi tea, and fermented fish essence to simulate the earthy and unpleasant notes of feces. The dish was served in small toilet-shaped bowls, making it a visual as well as culinary experience.

Shimizu and his manager, Hiroki Okada, irreverently marketed the restaurant, citing surveys that said most people claimed they would never go. But once they did, the real fun came not from eating the curry but from watching others’ reactions. According to Shimizu, nearly everyone who tried the dish finished it, although he suspected many did so out of pride or on a dare, but not because they enjoyed the meal.

Unexpectedly, Curry Shop Shimizu found success almost immediately, despite its outrageous concept. Tourists, local comedians, and even some celebrities came to see if the food really lived up to its promise. The restaurant’s notoriety drew so much attention that it extended its original limited run, staying open for months longer than planned because customers lined up long after it was supposed to close.

By the end of 2015, the shop had become a staple of Tokyo’s underground food scene. As it prepared to close in early January 2016, Shimizu pushed the joke further by offering extra-large servings in full-size squat-toilet replicas and experimenting with even more extreme ingredients like surströmming, the notoriously smelly fermented herring from Sweden.

The restaurant finally shut its doors on January 4, 2016, with a reputation as one of the most infamous eateries in modern Japan. Though it lasted less than a year, Curry Shop Shimizu became a symbol of Japan’s novelty food scene, where shock value and creativity often combine.