Insults with your burger? A sweary night out at Karen’s Diner where the service is the pits

manchestereveningnews.co.uk:

Straight out of the gate, the idea of going to Karen’s Diner filled me with dread. As anyone who’s been dragged into immersive theatre against their will would know, the cold, clammy terror of being picked on is very real. Karen’s is an Australian concept, first opened in Sydney. It’s part dining experience, part theatre, where the waiting staff are purposely rude, unhelpful, dismissive (if you’re lucky) and scorched-earth offensive (if you’re not).

And so Karen’s Diner is my idea of dining hell. Confrontation, stress, tension and awkwardness. Profanity, I enjoy very much. But the rest? No. No, no, no. So I arrived at the recently opened branch in Prestwich - there’s another in Sheffield which opened in February and another in Birmingham - wanting to be pretty much anywhere else in the world.

“Reservation?” Yes. “Name?” Ben. “Sh*t name.” “It’s your mum’s name, isn’t it?” fires back my dining companion, and I wince. She can be gobby. “A-HA-HA-HA-HA,” screams the waitress back inches from her face, before stopping dead with the fake laughter. People are now looking. On a table in the corner, I can see a woman wearing a poorly folded paper hat. On it is scrawled ‘messy b**ch’ in biro.

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We walk past the bar where a waitress is snarling as she pours a shot into a mug that is shaped like a toilet. We’re appointed another waitress. “Special occasion?” she asks. She looks my dining partner up and down and before the reply comes, she adds: “Maybe not.”

And I do chuckle a bit at that. We’re shown to easily the worst table in the room, right by the bar. There’s only one chair. So I just stand there, waiting for one or other of us to blink. The waitress fixes me in the eye, and then wanders off, so I sheepishly pull one