Frequently Asked Questions
Let's address some questions or concerns mentioned to us over time.
Q Why do you call yourselves a Butler cafe when you don't have any real men?
A That is a misnomer, or at best, a loose translation of what we are. We are based on a Japanese concept called a "Dansou cafe". If you look up the definition of "dansou" in Japanese, you get this:
Jeffrey's Japanese/English Dictionary
dansou
(n,vs) disguising oneself as a man
Notice where it specifically states "disguising oneself as a man". The only way that might not imply a woman dressed as a man involves flaming gay men and flannel shirts, which is not our focus either.
Q What's with the crossplaying thing anyway? Why not just have real men? What's a "Dansou cafe" all about?
A We covered what "dansou" means so now we'll cover the concept behind it. Maid cafes were the first of these concept-cafes on the market in Japan, with cute "Moe" girls dressed as poofy French maids serving your every need and calling customers "master" or "mistress". This primarily appealed to men. Women wanted something for themselves, and thus the "butler cafe" concept was born, where it was just like a maid cafe but all the servers were male and dressed as butlers instead of maids. They treated their female clientele like princesses.
Fans in love with yaoi fandom noticed that these butler men still didn't have the qualities they were looking for such as slender, effeminate figures, softer voices, and a gentle and romantic personality, so came up with their own idea. If men can have moe maids, some women can have manly butlers, why can't we have very yaoi cafes staffed with women dressed as men? These "characters" were sensitive like women and sensitive to their desires and needs because they themselves were women. They also had the effeminate figures and features that yaoi fans had come to love about their genre's characters. They simply added a male "polish" to their look to make it work.
A cafe waiter from Blue Rose from NAGOYA. A cafe waiter from Queen Dolce cafe.
These cafes took off, leading to many different ones all over Japan. Yaoi fans in the west decided to try their hand at creating a dansou cafe and "Cafe Verfuhren" was born at YaoiCon 2007. It was after watching their attempt that the members of Cafe Nocturne decided to try creating their own dansou cafe.
Q Well I don't like it. I want a cafe with real men!
A No problem. Contact programming@animenorth.com and tell them you wish to run your own butler cafe. Spend the money on costumes (or not), find men to be your butlers for you, talk to the hotel so that they will give you space to run your cafe, start up a webpage and discussion forum and pay hosting fees and domain name fees, post as often as possible on your website and forum, go to any other online place that will have you to advertise your cafe, decide what price(s) to charge for whatever "service(s)" you are offering, have very little time to attend panels you would prefer to be at because those panels are happening when you're suppose to be running the cafe, and then deal with all the criticism before, during, and after the con where people complain you weren't the kind of event they really wanted. Good luck!
If you have any other questions to add to the FAQ, email admin@cafenocturne.com.