Female Supremacy Articles - Page 23

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Swallowtail, Tokyo's first butler café. Since Swallowtail opened last March, customers have lined up for reservations. The café tripled its space in October, but tables are still booked solid. The most ardent customers come daily and might never leave if Otsuka hadn't put an 80-minute limit on reservations. The restaurant's success has spawned a wave of similar butler cafés elsewhere in Tokyo, including some that offer gaijin (foreign) butlers who help female patrons practice their English, but Swallowtail remains the gold standard.

It's easy to see why. Otsuka has planned every detail of the café, from the two months of training would-be butlers undergo to the grandfather clock by the fireplace to the leather volumes of obscure poetry (by that famous Victorian bard, William Allingham) that adorn the shelves. "There's no place like this, so we had to make it from our imagination," says Otsuka. It doesn't hurt that the food is surprisingly good, prepared with the help of Paul Okada, a hospitality consultant who spent 12 years as the food-and-beverage director at the Four Seasons Tokyo.