Jess Adamson: Why we need a restaurant run by dementia sufferers in Adelaide

Across the city, there are hundreds of little problems that make life hard for huge sections of the community. Here’s just a few of them, writes Jess Adamson.

There’s a restaurant in Tokyo that I really want to go to. It’s called the Restaurant of Mistaken Orders.

The staff are friendly and engaging but they regularly mess up your order.

Why? Because they’re all living with dementia.

One elderly waiter shows a group of guests to their table and accidentally sits down with them to eat.

Another delivers a meal to a young patron but giggles because she cannot for the life of her remember what it is.

Restaurant of Mistaken Orders in Tokyo. Picture: Supplied

A middle-aged woman with early onset dementia plays a piano so exquisitely, it brings patrons to tears.

A friend recently visited a pop-up version of the restaurant in Singapore. He ordered a coffee and out it came a short time later, piping hot, in a plastic cup with a straw.

“Go easy,” the manager gently warned him. “It’s really hot. Sorry about the cup.”

At the Restaurant of Mistaken Orders, the orders are mistaken 37 per cent of the time.

But 99 per cent of the time, the customers leave happy because they’ve witnessed something magical, and opened their minds to the frailties of ageing men and women.

The restaurant is the brainchild of Shiro Oguni who visited a dedicated home for adults with dementia and found their isolation heartbreaking.

The Restaurant of Mistaken Orders in Tokyo. Picture: Supplied

Here in South Australia, we need to think hard about his concept which invites compassion, acceptance and inclusion. It enables proud men and women to remain active and involved in society, no matter how bad their memory is. They feel useful, capable and accepted again.

Most of us know of someone living with dementia, many of us have lost dear friends to the disease. Some of you reading this may worry that you have it.

Right now there are more than 400,000 Australians living with all forms of dementia.

Without a medical breakthrough, that number is expected to increase to more than 800,000 by 2058.

There are 28,650 Australians in their 30s, 40s and 50s who have been diagnosed with younger onset dementia.

Our community is not dementia-friendly. We’ve got some serious work to do.

For starters, we need to bust the myth that for anyone who lives with dementia, the lights are out and there’s nobody home. There is very much a person in there to connect with.

Last week I had the privilege of talking with Ann Pietsch, 70, a former nurse, midwife and health administrator. Ann is happily married to Tim and they have four sons in their 30s.

Ann helped to run programs for people living with dementia, to keep them in their homes for as long as possible.

But 11 years ago, when she was 59, alarm bells started to ring.

“I knew something was really wrong,” she says.

“I was at a meeting discussing a paper and I asked for a copy of it because I’d never seen it before. Everyone looked a bit awkward because it had my handwriting all over it.

“I was forgetting people’s names at work and at home things were just getting heavier and harder to do. I couldn’t figure out how to hang the sheets, I couldn’t get them on the right line.

“I couldn’t do all the finance reporting that I was really good at. I’d get to the final numbers but didn’t know how I got there so the next day I had to go through and do it all again.”

Ann was diagnosed with Lewy body disease, a condition that incorporates both Parkinson’s disease and dementia.

Ann Pietsch, pictured with husband Tim,. Picture: Supplied

But since the day she found out, she’s made it her mission to make the most of life, to break down the stigma surrounding dementia and to make it easier for others on the same path.

Eleven years after her diagnosis, at the age of 70, she’s a regular volunteer at a church museum in North Adelaide and an active dementia advocate with Dementia Australia.

Her balance isn’t as good as it used to be, she regularly forgets names and passwords and she suffers from frightening hallucinations at night – but she’s determined to keep her mind and body as active as possible.

So how can we help people like Ann living with dementia in our community?

Let’s start with signage.

Too many city carparks don’t have clear directions. I park in them all the time. I consider myself reasonably astute but unless I take a photo of my car on its level, or leave a trail of breadcrumbs to my event, there’s a chance I won’t find my car afterwards. It’s an easy one to fix. We need simple, easy-to-follow signage.

Stop with the fancy pictures on bathroom doors. Is there any chance we could just put Men and Women signs instead of a cowboy picture or a lady with a funny hat silhouette? I’ve visited the urinal more times than I’d like to remember because I cannot work out what on earth the picture is trying to tell me.

You need a degree to wash your hands in public bathrooms these days. The hi-tech automated soap dispensers make me anxious, most of the time they don’t work, and the dryer is so loud it sounds like a jet taking off. Ann tells me she often waits and watches to see how someone else does it, and then copies them. Smart bathrooms are too smart for their own good.

Let’s not have a Push sign on a door that clearly needs to be pulled. Why does that happen so often? It’s embarrassing and confusing and those living with dementia lose their confidence when thing don’t go right. They feel like it’s easier for them to stay at home.

The menus in cafes and restaurants need to be clear and easy to navigate with text big enough to read without having to hold it at arm’s length.

The Restaurant of Mistaken Orders in Tokyo. Picture: Supplied

Supermarkets with bright white light and loud music are too much for people like Ann. Some of the big chains have introduced quiet hours – we need to extend that brilliant initiative.

Countries like Scandinavia are leading the way in addressing ageism, and the loneliness that comes with it, by not separating the elderly from the rest of the community.

Our living arrangements present a great opportunity to move forward, particularly as we face Australia’s greatest demographic challenge, an ageing population.

I’ve grown up thinking that aged-care homes or retirement villages are where I’ll spend my twilight years. But as the Boomers are starting to show us, that’s all changing.

There’s growing demand for intergenerational community living and we’re seeing it here in Adelaide. Many older people are choosing to live in apartments, villages and developments with young families around them – children, pets, life and laughter. If those communities could include people living with dementia, we’d go a long way to dispelling the stigma around it. Meaningful bonds are formed between generations. The young residents feel a sense of responsibility and the elderly feel safe and connected.

We know that staying connected improves the long-term health benefits for all of us, including those living with dementia. Developments with easy-to-navigate environments and good access to local services would help enable people with dementia to live independently. If we want to age well and live with dignity we need brave and innovative design.

While some men and women living with dementia need acute care, it doesn’t seem right to me that many, including those in their 50s with early onset dementia, are placed in nursing homes or hospitals which can be noisy, traumatic and frightening.

We need to show more respect to those living with dementia. For too long, because of a lack of understanding, they’ve been labelled, belittled and ignored.

Later this year, a group of Australian CEOs and executives will take a study tour to Japan, a country with the fastest-growing ageing population in the world.

Anyone whose been there knows just how respectful the Japanese are to their ageing. It’s incorporated into everything they do.

The group, led by well-known aged-care executive Judy Martin, will visit the Restaurant of Mistaken Orders with a view to adopting something similar right here in our country, and potentially in Adelaide.

It’s a simplistic but powerful model, Judy says, that could be easily implemented in our community.

Watch this space, we may soon have our own kindness project to embrace and learn from.

And you never know, Ann Pietsch might just be running it.