“This summer, experience liberation,” promises The Bunyadi on its crisp, minimalist website.
Walk inside London’s newly-opened organic restaurant and it doesn’t look like a place where you’d achieve liberation. A rounded bar is flanked by seats, and perhaps a few Londoners dressed for a night out. Turn a few strategically-placed corners along the so-called “path to purity”, however, and it’s suddenly a nudist enclave. Flashes of flesh flicker beneath soft candlelight – you might not see everyone’s bare assets though, thanks to a network of bamboo dividers enclosing the dining tables in semi-privacy (bathrobes included, for the shy).
The Bunyadi, apparently taking its name from a Hindi word for “fundamental” or “natural”, sells its brand of nudism as a stripping-away of humankind’s “impurities” – “the idea is to experience pure liberation,” says Seb Lyall, founder of the group responsible for the restaurant.
The Bunyadi’s definition of “liberation” lies in striking, almost dangerously cliché, contrast to Saudi Arabia’s own strictly gender-segregated restaurant scene.
The partitions that divide many Saudi restaurants - apparently now a longtime fixture of Saudi Arabia’s food world – separate “family” groups of diners (read: “groups containing women”) from “non-family” groups in an expression of modesty far removed from The Bunyadi’s celebratory nudity.
For some Saudis, the gender segregation offered by the controversial barriers offers a form of public liberation – freedom to eat from beneath a facial veil without worrying about being stared at, freedom to act with a modicum of ease in a public space that would otherwise demand scrupulous modesty.
Still, the implications of Saudi Arabia’s gender-separated restaurants sometimes border on the absurd. Earlier this year, religious police banned women from entering a Starbucks in Riyadh after the café’s gender-separation wall had collapsed. “Send your driver to order,” read an impromptu sign taped to the door, in reference to the male chauffeurs Saudi women must hire, since they are forbidden to drive. In another instance, religious police stormed a shopping mall food court after discovering there were no gender partitions in the dining area. “They started pulling chairs out from under everyone,” a witness told Al Arabiya.
Admittedly, it’s a tad unfair to compare a nudist restaurant in London to Saudi police-enforced public modesty. Still, the contrast is there – at least as far as public dining is concerned.
While The Bunyadi’s bamboo screens and fluffy bathrobes offer a contingency plan from the “pure liberation” of public nudity – Saudi restaurant partitions demand from their patrons a wholly different conception of liberation. Theirs is a brand supposedly felt beneath layers of modest clothing, obscured by screens and makeshift barriers from the intrusive gazes of strangers, and expressed most fully in complete and utter privacy.
Perhaps, then, The Bunyadi’s lofty claims of dining “liberation” contain a slice of truth – albeit one that is sharply contested across cultures. For now the first admitted guests off a 46,000 heavy waiting list that flocked earlier today to sample this naked trend will not be sparing a thought for conservative contrasts continents away.
