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[title]Did you know that there are currently three separate places in London where you can eat penis-shaped waffles?
Yup, if you have an overwhelming urge to devour a golden, crunchy phallus in public you can do it here. But who are these erotic waffle joints actually for? Hen parties? Bemused tourists? Recovering cannibals? I first saw these waffles on TikTok and became mesmerised by the idea that such a frivolous, niche business idea could find a market in post-pandemic London (all three spots have opened since 2021). So of course I had to go to all three dick-slingers to try and work out why they’re staging an erotic food takeover of this beleagured city.
Go eat a bag of dicks
I head first to The Cockery, which serves up penis waffles on sticks in an atmosphere of intensely camp sterility. Its clean white and neon pink decor is ornamented with enigmatic slogans. ‘The experience is lived inside,’ says the frontage in large letters. Puzzling. I guess it makes more sense in Spanish (this joint’s original branches are all in Spain’s tourist hotspots). Within, all is clearer. An almost pathologically peppy woman behind the counter lays on the innuendo with a trowel as she squirts batter into metal dick-shaped moulds. ‘Are you ready to be pounded?’ she asks, aggressively carving extraneous stray bits off the freshly made waffle cocks. Then, it’s time for decoration. ‘Do you want European, Latin, African or Welsh?’ she asks, in what feels like an unnecessarily racialised way of describing the different shades of chocolate coating (bafflingly, ‘Welsh’ is a Mr Blobby pink). ‘Enjoy and don’t choke!’ she yells at me as I escape into Soho to eat my very own personal dick. It’s raining, so I shelter under the eaves of a nearby church. Sorry, Jesus.
To be fair, the penis is delicious
If you want a less intense, girlier experience, Zizi Factory is the one. Originating in Paris, this joint sells ‘sexy French waffles’ in the shape of both penises and vaginas, which all have adorable Francophone names like Lucien or Yvette. The service is characteristically French in a different way. Our resident waffle administrator delivers her wares with the unsmiling efficiency of a nurse performing a cervical smear. No pillow talk this time. I pose self-consciously for a selfie in front of some pink neon wall art that says ‘I licked it so it’s mine’. The rain outside keeps falling. A woman with a baby in a pram buys herself a crispy vagina and wanders off to eat it in the drizzle.
This interlude of Gallic melancholy done, I psyche myself up for the biggest challenge of all. New restaurant Naked Soho, boasts not just batter-based genitals but a whole menu of erotic food. It recently got ordered to remove obscene items from its window by Westminster City Council. But don’t worry, there are genitals galore inside. If you’ve forgotten what gonads look like, this is the place to refresh your memory. The walls are decked with little penis and vagina sculptures that remind me of the footholds you get at climbing centres. There’s a giant gold phallus standing in the corner that more normal restaurants would put a pot plant in. There’s even wall art of Botticelli’s Venus tenderly cradling a massive sky-blue dildo.
At the table next to us, two neatly dressed thirtysomething men falteringly attempted to make first-date chit-chat about their jobs and hobbies next to a large sculpture of a penis/banana hybrid: I guess coming here is a failsafe way to put sex on the table. I eavesdrop, sipping a sugary cocktail through a penis straw.
It feels surreal, like being embroiled in a student art project or an ill-conceived ITV dating show. And that sense only grows as the food starts arriving. The fun thing about this place is that there’s no way of knowing whether what you’re ordering is, a) completely normal food on a normal plate, b) normal food on a dick-shaped plate, or c) some kind of interactive food-based roleplay.
The ‘cockprese’ is just a standard cheese and tomato salad. But the charcuterie board is shaped like a glittery penis. And the dessert? Penis waffle, obviously, but it’s hand-delivered by a guy in a wipe-clean Village People-style sexy-policeman uniform, who holds it aloft like a particularly ineffective truncheon.
‘I know you don’t like dick but try this one!’ he announces, clocking and then working around my partner’s lesbianism like the absolute pro he is.
To be fair, the penis is delicious: crispy outside, melting inside and supplemented with a sweet crème anglaise.
But taste isn’t really the point here. A penis waffle is the ultimate example of food that’s been completely divorced from its original purpose of supplying flavour and nutrition. You eat it to get likes on the ’gram. To make your crush notice you. To remind your ex what he’s missing. To signal your open-mindedness. Or because you’re on holiday, and your critical faculties have been melted by a potent cocktail of sun and Aperol Spritzes.
I end up weirdly obsessed with the penis waffle. Not with the experience of eating it, particularly. But with the origins of this phallic snack. Who dreamt it all up, and why?
Spreading like a rash
There’s a sticky little problem brewing for the world’s penis-waffle entrepreneurs. Much like funeral homes, they don’t get many repeat customers. It’s a one-time novelty act. And the more shops that open, the less novel their products become. People who get in early do well, but come late (forgive me) to the party and you could end up with broken dreams and a lot of limp dicks.
But what about the person who invented the OG penis waffle? They must be rolling in it, right? Well, it’s a bit unclear. I do a bit of digging, and discover that the penis waffle began in Taiwan in 2010, at a now-defunct stall called ‘A Piece of Gayke’, in Shilin Night Market, a labyrinthine space where new trends are born.
‘According to the owner, the concept behind the store is for girls who got cheated on to bite on this unique waffle stick and chew off the anger,’ reads a blog post from 2013, which offers no citation for this info.
After a bit of sleuthing, I unearth some YouTube videos of the original ‘A Piece of Gayke’. The footage shows a ramshackle little stall that’s covered in laminated printouts of customers eating edible dicks. A tantalising Instagram post suggests the stand also sold edible sanitary towels and edible condoms (two products that probably wouldn’t take off globally, even in pop-up-obsessed London).
I peer at the beaming face of the older guy behind the counter. Was he the inventor? The only thing that’s clear is that whoever invented the penis waffle didn’t manage to patent it. On AliExpress, you can buy more than 40 different kinds of electric penis waffle machines, with endless choices: would you like to manufacture 16 penises at a time or is four enough? Would you like the cheapy £100 model, or is the £700 version more up your street? There are vagina waffle options too, but notably fewer. Several include ‘A Piece of Gayke’ in their name, as a callback to that near-forgotten Taiwanese stall.
It feels like a microcosm of the way that food trends spread, of the way that the West ransacks Asia for ideas and makes a fortune by repackaging them in a way that’s palatable to its ravenous audience.
Taiwan is full of innovation. Bubble tea was invented there by a small tea stall that also failed to profit from its product’s worldwide spread. There are probably new trends brewing in hidden corners of Shilin Night Market, where anyone with a food concept can set up a stand and try to sell it to the world. In Taipei, there’s a restaurant called Modern Toilet where you can eat poo-themed food out of toilet bowls: how long before that spreads (apologies) around the world, too?
Visitors sought out ‘A Piece of Gayke’ because they saw it as something uniquely Taiwanese. But among them were entrepreneurs who realised how its concept could be adapted to the tourist hotspots of Spain or the beaches of Brazil. Now, you can get penis waffles in Manchester, Bangkok, Rio, Sydney, Majorca or Warsaw: at any hour of the day or night, someone is munching a waffle dick and probably getting a selfie of themselves while they’re at it.
But not everyone is a fan. In Warsaw, the opening of penis waffle shop The Dickery caused a major outcry: ‘The worst sewage from the Western world is pouring into Poland,’ frothed far-right politician Krzysztof Bosak, after the bakery shared images of its products being given to small kids on Twitter. In Bangkok, celebrity chef Yingsak Chonglertjetsadawong spoke out against a local penis waffle shop on Facebook: ‘Would you put this in a monk’s alms bowl?’ he wondered, perhaps hyperbolically.
In conservative countries, erotic bakeries can be an act of protest: a symbolic gesture that says that sex is okay and normal, just like eating a waffle is. ‘Our goal is to make the shape of our products evoke thoughts of joy, equality and acceptance,’ said the owners of Warsaw’s The Dickery, calling for ‘bodies and sexuality to become something normal’ in their interview with local news outlet TuWrocław. They’re even giving out sex-education books to customers on social media, proving that penis waffles can be a starting point for big discussions about sexuality and shame.
Supper and sensuality
I initially saw penis waffles as something troubling about London. An example of social media-obsessed culture, of how capitalism promotes food as entertainment, not nourishment. But maybe these shops also say something positive about this city’s attitude towards sexuality.
I chat to sex and intimacy coach Haneen Khan, who’s worked on sensual supper club Unforbidden, where diners are served guidance on sexuality alongside their food.
She reckons that chatting about sex over food is a great way to get people to share: ‘Eating food is universal, so it can definitely open up the gate for people to become comfortable talking about sexual themes.’
That doesn’t mean that Khan turns up at a workshop brandishing fistfuls of crispy dicks. But she does use food to start conversations and to overcome people’s anxieties about giving and receiving pleasure. ‘Fruit is a beautiful tool to explore how we experience sensory pleasure,’ she says, ‘whether it’s touching, smelling, or eating. Our mouth is a very intimate area, so food lets us explore that. I’ve learnt the art of eating fruit in a way that’s incredibly evocative.’
And although she’s not a massive fan of dick-shaped waffles, Khan is excited by the potential for food and sex to come together. ‘I would love to see more restaurants bring in sexuality, and make it more mainstream,’ she says. ‘That would be amazing.’
In 2016, naked London restaurant Bunyadi had a 40,000-long waiting list of people eager to get their clothes off. In 2003, short-lived venture Coffee Cake & Kink attracted eager punters with its offering of hot drinks, glossy erotic magazines and fetish-based wall art. But right now, there aren’t many options if you want a sexy London dining experience.
For Khan, the potential is clear. Her eyes close and she enters a kind of trance as she recites the names of foods she considers sexy: ‘oranges, bananas, peaches. Chocolate, obviously. Ice cream. Doughnuts can be quite interesting.’
I decide not to ask what she gets up to with doughnuts.
Instead, I set off to scour London for places that embrace the sexier side of dining.
In Camden, I shiver my way through a sexy table dance at the cavernous Coyote Ugly bar. This converted railway arch offers a kind of theme-park-esque take on American dive-bar culture, as inspired by the cult ’90s movie. The dancers are undeniably hard-working and the deep-fried snacks are delicious (in the US, it’s apparently pretty normal to go to strip bars for the food alone). But it’s hard to feel sexy when it’s too chilly to take your coat off.
I hear word of a steak joint in Kensington where the waitresses are dressed as French maids. Is it sexy? Well, Le Relais de Venise is definitely a spot that fetishises a certain kind of Gallic culinary lavishness: mounds of rare steak and béarnaise sauce are generously heaped on to your plate by nattily uniformed waitresses who speed through this perma-packed restaurant. The chocolate vacherin arrives as a vast phallic tower surrounded by a lake of sauce, a triumph of unremitting sensory intensity. If eating chocolate really does stimulate your brain in the same way as falling in love (as scientists claim), I’m basically married to that dessert now. Send flowers.
There’s more sexy chocolate action at Big Mamma Group’s wildly lavish Ave Mario, which serves up a pud called Chocolate Al Porno. My review describes it as ‘the kind of dessert even Nigella Lawson might dismiss as “a bit much”’ and I stand by that, melting at the memory of my encounter with that intense puddle of molten mousse, even if the packed-out restaurant didn’t give me and it the privacy we desired.
Nigella didn’t invent the concept of food being sexy (I feel like the Ancient Greeks and their grape-fuelled orgies can probably take the credit for that) but she’s certainly been a pioneer in talking openly about how sexy food can be.
When it comes to sexualising food, Nigella walked so a thousand sexy foodtok creators could run. In her 1998 debut cookbook ‘How to Eat’, she even includes a section called ‘Come back to my cave’, that advises eating spaghetti carbonara or sticky ribs in bed. ‘You’ll just have to fight the bourgeois instinct to fret about your nice clean sheets,’ she advises, thrillingly.
That particular inducement captures an undeniable truth: that culinary sexiness depends on context. Eating a chocolate pudding in a crowded brasserie that smells slightly of drains (sorry, Relais de Venise) isn’t really sexy. Nor is eating a penis-shaped waffle in a bright pink Soho restaurant, surrounded by plaster sculptures of genitals. But sharing tacos in dimly lit, velvet-draped Hackney basement bar Dona? Now we’re talking.
Arguably, central London’s hectic, cash-strapped dining scene is too focused on the bottom line for culinary sexiness to truly blossom. Being turfed off your table after two hours isn’t sexy, and nor is being crammed in like sardines in a tin. But in more easygoing Berlin (of course Berlin!), imaginative types are dreaming up new ways for sex and food to come together.
For example, We Feast offers ten hours of guided workshops where participants can bring together food and sex, with events like ‘Claim Your Cake’ or ‘Self-Pressed Juice’, culminating in a ‘tantric and poetic dinner’ offering ‘creative nourishment, glittering nudity and epic chocolate’.
Could this be the next sexy food trend to invade London? Ten-hour erotic banquets? Somehow, I doubt it. But it’s a reminder that new ideas spring up in places where people have time and space to fantasise, far away from the hectic, mad, über-capitalist laboratory of Soho. Perhaps, in a warehouse in Tottenham, someone’s dreaming up the next sexy food concept, and I can’t wait to try it.