Hospital food never tasted so good

A Taipei restaurant-bar is letting visitors order "medicine" from a menu and dripping it into their glasses from a transparent ceiling-suspended vat, becoming the latest oddball themed restaurant in Taiwan's capital.

The reader is invited to consider the nurse fetish; it is an institution that lies at the heart of DS. Many enter DS prepared to be immersed in sleaze but instead find a disquietingly congruous marriage of unabashed hedonism and well-funded good taste.

Overall, DS looks like many other posh restaurant-and-bars, with lots of spot lighting, funny-shaped chairs, and clear alcohol bottles lit from underneath. Except that many of the tables look like sleek hospital beds, there are a few wheelchairs and crutches sitting around, back lit X-rays decorate some walls, and above each table hangs a big "IV drip," which functions like a small keg. And then, of course, there are nurses everywhere you look.

The hospital theme is pervasive, but somehow subtle, or at least natural and it turns out that a wheelchair does not look out of place next to a wall of Smirnoff Ice bottles. There is something appealing about the audacity of taking a concept as flagrantly trashy as this and making something so cool out of it. To top it off, the food is good.

On Saturday nights there is the "showgirl" performance. The nurses/showgirls outfits are not tailored to be especially kinky... and the curtained-off "intensive care unit" is nothing more than a place where large groups can sit together.

Other touches include a sign marked "emergency room" leading to the toilets.

The spot is the latest in a string of strange-themed eateries in Taipei, as local entrepreneurs cater to people with a taste for the quirky and offbeat.