Theme restaurants in China

America may be all too familiar with theme restaurants, those take-it-or-leave-it dining destinations that use hyper-decoration to transport you to a foreign environment. These kitschy watering holes have somewhat lofty restaurant design ambitions in mind, but their execution usually leaves diners with the standard experience of being stuck in a tourist trap.

In China, however, the theme restaurant is experiencing a heyday. As we learned from Newsweek, a series of “red restaurants” are taking the format of the dinner show, already popular in Beijing, and spinning it to repaint a tumultuous part of Chinese history as material for sensationalist dinner theater.