Kirby Café















While Nintendo's Pokémon Company subsidiary has enjoyed most of the company's good-news headlines in the past two weeks, the company at large has more changes in the horizon, and another "real-world" initiative—teased back in May—is now coming to fruition: an official Nintendo restaurant.

Say hello to the Kirby Café. The Japan-only (for now) restaurant chain was teased last month, but its existence received a full, formal unveiling Wednesday morning in its home country, all revolving around the company's 26-year-old puffball character. The café's first location will open in Osaka on August 5, with another location to follow in Tokyo "soon."

Fans will be able to purchase pastries, drinks, and a mix of noodle and teriyaki menu items. Some of those merely have a character from the game stuck onto the plate as a sticker, while others are shaped to resemble characters and other game content, including Kirby-shaped custard cakes, a cup of soup that looks just like the Maxim Tomato item, and the Whispy Woods tree's face apparently being made out of bread, meat, and beans.

You'd best believe there'll be exclusive Kirby Café merchandise as well, and most of it falls into the series' colorful-and-fluffy aesthetic. Cartoon renderings of Kirby, Waddle Dee, King Dedede, and other characters have been drawn on items such as stacking mugs, magnets, tote bags, cocktail muddlers, neck pillows, and postcards, and Nintendo announced plans to open a no-food, just-merch version of its Kirby Café in Nagoya on August 24. At least one piece of merchandise—a series of collectible acrylic "2.5-D" figurines—will require a food purchase.

This news comes on the same day that Pokémon Go's Japanese version saw another delay, this time related to the leak that Niantic's augmented-reality game will make every Japanese McDonald's restaurant a "gym" in the game. We can only imagine the Kirby Café will be crawling with Pokémon Go players once it launches August 5, but there's no word on whether that will be thanks to an official partnership at this point.

Nintendo's Japanese arm has not said if something akin to Kirby Café will launch in other countries or whether other company franchises might get the restaurant treatment before long. We may also get an official Nintendo theme park attraction, by way of a collaboration with Universal Studios, but neither Nintendo nor Universal has revealed any further information about those plans since that May tease came out.

Listing image by Kirby Café