Kirby Café is a restaurant chain in Japan operated by Benelic and themed around the Kirby franchise and its titular protagonist, both owned by HAL Laboratory. The chain currently comprises three permanent locations—one within the special ward of Sumida City in the Solamachi entertainment complex, one within Hakata-ku in the Canal City Hakata entertainment complex, and one within Shinsaibashi in the Daimaru department store—and a number of temporary locations which have run continuously since August 2016.
History
On July 7, 2016, Kirby Café's Twitter account posted its first tweet, which teased the upcoming opening of the café.[1] A month later, Kirby Café was formally unveiled in Osaka and opened in August as the first in a Japan-only chain. A second location in opened in Tokyo soon after, followed by a merchandise-only location in Nagoya. This version of the café was a temporary pop-up restaurant which ran until October 2016.[2]
After a hiatus in 2017, Kirby Café was eventually re-opened to the public in September 2018, again in a temporary capacity.