The Restaurant That Wasn’t a Restaurant in Phuket, Thailand

While waiting for our meals Lee and I were engrossed in our conversation about something else, but we kept getting distracted as we looked around the restaurant and noticed how odd this place really was.

“Why do they have seven waitresses on when the restaurant is almost empty?” Lee remarked.

He was right, there were an abundance of waitresses standing around holding menus — and they were all young, beautiful women in short dresses. It did seem odd to have so many staff members working on such a slow night. However, sometimes restaurants are overstaffed, so we thought we’d give them the benefit of the doubt.

Our food arrived and it was disappointingly mediocre. I had pasta and it seemed like the sauce had come straight from a jar from the supermarket. However, eating Western food is hit or miss in Thailand sometimes, so we still decided to give the restaurant the benefit of the doubt. As we ate, we noticed a few more odd traits about this restaurant.

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A few other patrons arrived at the restaurant as we were eating, but after a while, we noticed they were all men dining by themselves. They didn’t order food, they would simply order a beer. We weren’t sure if we were imagining things, but then after one of the lone diners drank his beer, he headed to the back of the restaurant instead of leaving through the front door. Why wasn’t anyone else ordering food? Why were the only other diners solo men? Why did our waitress look so confused when we had actually ordered from the menu? Nothing about this restaurant seemed to make sense to us.

Slowly, we started to put the pieces together

as we whispered to each other over our flavorless, generic pasta and we started evaluating just how absurd the situation was.

I’m not saying this restaurant definitely was a front for a brothel, but I’m not saying it wasn’t. We will never really know for sure. (And if it was, it certainly fooled us at first!) But the entire situation was pretty strange indeed, and I’ll always wonder what was really going on in the restaurant that wasn’t a restaurant.

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