About a year ago, a 24 year-old York University student by the name of Aaron Wang, had the idea of opening a specialty café, whereby the waitresses would wear maid outfits and serve Chinese desserts in a Chinese atmosphere. I suppose Aaron was attempting to capitalize on the popularity of Maid Cosplay cafés in Japan. The restaurant was named, iMaid Café and it was located in Scarborough (Toronto), Canada (where I live!). iMaid Café actually received quite a lot or publicity when it first opened and it even received coverage from the CBC television network:

Sadly, it looks as though the restaurant has closed its doors permanently. Apparently, the café’s management has been behind in their rent and owe about $8,300 CAD ($8,329 USD) to their landlord. Though the actual doors have been shuttered, the iMaid Café website has not been updated.

Actually, when I first heard about the iMaid Café in the Toronto Star newspaper, I was definitely intrigued by the idea and so Nathan and I decided to try it out. My first impression was that the café was pretty bare. Aside from the waitresses in maid costumes, there wasn’t much else that was interesting about the place. I just remember a television on the wall which kept looping Chinese karaoke music and Chinese magazines on a rack. We thought that maybe the food would redeem the café, but again, it didn’t seem to impress us. As we were there, Nathan and I were thinking that iMaid Café had so much potential, but it didn’t seem to deliver what customers wanted. Well, hopefully this won’t discourage other entrepreneurial otakus from opening other maid cafés in the future.

-Stephen