If you’ve ever wondered what the tiny house trend would look like on a restaurant, then there’s a restaurant in Ho Chi Minh City that might be able to answer your question.
Robata Dining An is a Japanese restaurant in Ho Chi Minh City’s Japantown street, Le Thanh Ton, and it has a unique feature that makes it stand out - it’s tiny. Once a storage space, the restaurant is a project of designer Mamoru Maeda and one of its rooms is less than four square metres.
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The first floor of Robata Dining An fits perfectly into the traditional style of the Japanese Izakaya, where guests can sit at the counter and see how the chefs prepare the food by looking into the open kitchen. But it’s the second floor that’s truly pièce de résistance of the whole restaurant. With its glass façade, guests face directly onto the street and so the small room seems bigger than its 3.7 square meters.
The room is also decorated with a traditional Japanese design, Tonosama’s harakiri - "Tonosama which is ancient feudal lords and harakiri [being] the ritual suicide by sword". The colour palette of the room echoes its decoration, with "gold on the ceiling expressing a sense of opulence while red paint on the wall [represents] sadness".
Robata Dining An offers a traditional Japanese menu with sushi, sashimi, grills and a huge variety of drinks. And considering its unique architecture, it makes for a perfect Insutabae, "which means an Instagram spot in Japanese". You can learn more about it at its official website here.
