English Cafe Mickey House — Restaurant in Tokyo

One of the WORST places you can ever go in Takadanobaba as a foreigner, the official gaijin zoo of the district, no more, no less. I made the mistake of hanging out there during over 3 months last year, waisting my money and my time for nothing, as an actual foreign student of japanese. This place behind its cover of being "friendly" will make you feel more isolated than ever (yes). If you want to go there to meet/discuss with japanese people, you ll find some of them, but they are all staff or only there as visitors to strictly use you in order to practice their english. The japanese table is priced 1000 yen per person for just a cafe, and disappointing for what it gives. Not much of an actual help for japanese itself, since there is only one table for japanese where it should be many more tables with actual real people and not those staff actors just paid for talking to you. This café is a good place to add 100 followers on your insta like a robot, and never being able to actually see or talk any of them once ever after. Do not hope for hanging out with people working in this place, or visiting this place. Neither to build a social circle in that place, because you ll hit a very painful wall, guaranteed. All those positive reviews are probably from people that saw japan during only one week in their entire life, and spent their week in this café. Most japanese people going there pay very high price and it's not encouraging them to keep coming. The bar air-conditioning is just too high, making you sweat, it's just so annoying. The service is pretty loose, the guy at the bar looks like he is not giving a damn about his job, let's not talk about the cafe owner that never smiles and looks very full of himself. The cafe is poorly designed in the interior, making it look cheap, but still makes you pay higher price than a restaurant....

Staff are non-locals who sit in the table and chat with the guests. I paid 500 yen to join and it comes with tea and coffee and you can get as much as you want. I think Japanese pay double.

The setup is mostly those who are 20-early 30's. The staff are working holiday types and young travellers. It's nice to hear stories about their first impressions of Japan, it seems like most of them are here for the first time.

If you're in that age bracket, this place could be a spot for you. This is what you can expect.

I felt very out of place here with the age group and these language exchange mostly benefit those from the west. I feel like my options are immediately cut in half the moment I try to find a table to join.

The other thing is, some of the guys there are standoffish and seem like they mostly target women and well off locals. Can't blame them. It's a game social climbers play.

There's an Italian guy and Hispanic guy, I think they're both staff. Both wearing sunglasses inside the room and it's 6 pm. Well, it looks creepy to me. Is it poker night or are we still living out what we were in high school?

The rating can be higher if you're under 35 and benefit from the...

Quite sure that I reviewed Mickey House before, but apparently Google Maps decided to erase it. When I first came to Japan I was a frequent visitor, but that was many years ago. I have stopped by a number of times in recent years, but often just to see if there's any really old folks around. I mean old in the sense of visiting Mickey House for many years, and I haven't met any of my old acquaintances, though there's usually some older people there. Summarizing today's reactions, I felt the English levels were lower, and I'm kind of lazy about communicating in simplified English, especially when they might make an issue of resorting to Japanese. Paid staff are often interesting characters, speaking an unusual language in today's case. I do think the coffee was better than I remember it. Right before COVID they were doing some humor stuff that had me interested in visiting on a regular basis, but nothing...