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Wonderful school festival / cultural festival

[Cafe × ____] Recommended cafe concept ideas for a school cultural festival

When setting up a booth at a school or cultural festival, a café is highly recommended.

It’s popular and you can create originality by combining various concepts.

However, when you actually start discussing what kind of café to make, you might find it surprisingly hard to come up with ideas—or you might end up with too many to choose from.

So in this article, we’ll introduce a whole range of café concepts perfect for cultural festivals.

Try launching a café with a concept that no other class or group is doing, and make sure to delight all your visitors!

[Cafe × ____] Recommended cafe concept ideas for a school culture festival (1–10)

Planetarium Cafe

Japan’s first! A full-fledged planetarium opens inside an airport: “Starry Café.”
Planetarium Cafe

Why are the night skies in Hokkaido and Okinawa so beautiful, I wonder? Is it because smog gathers over big cities? If it’s a class where people who love stars get together, a planetarium café could be great.

With blackout curtains and a planetarium machine, it’s actually pretty easy to set up.

You can make the café menu star-themed, too.

For example, star-shaped cookies, crescent moon ice pops, Milky Way chiffon cake, and a “star drink” that uses tapioca pearls as little stars—anything star-related is fair game! A planetarium in an air-conditioned room is perfect for summer!

Local production for local consumption cafe

How about a farm-to-table café that cooks with vegetables and other ingredients grown in your own area? It’s recommended both as an initiative mindful of environmental issues and the SDGs, and simply as a way to support your local community.

It can also be educational—learning things like “What specialties does this place have?” and “Why have they been produced here?” In towns with roadside stations, it’s especially easy to find local products.

You could even try negotiating directly with farmers to see if they’ll sell you ingredients.

Puzzle-solving cafe

In recent years, there’s been a trend of creating content that combines puzzles with various other elements.

So how about combining puzzles with a cafe to create a “Puzzle Cafe”? For example, the cafe’s interior and menu could hide puzzles that customers solve as they go.

You could set up a specific worldbuilding theme or story and design puzzles to match it.

Alternatively, it might be fun if solving the puzzles deepens people’s understanding of cafes, coffee, or school.

[Cafe × ___] Recommended Cafe Concept Ideas for a School Culture Festival (11–20)

Haunted House Cafe

Serve eerily grotesque-looking foods and have ghosts wait on customers… Even though you’ll feel chills down your spine, you’ll somehow end up feeling warm and fuzzy—so let’s try running a haunted house café.

Keep the room dim with spooky décor, and pay special attention to the costumes.

Even ordinary drinks can look like suspicious concoctions if you serve them in, say, a lab beaker.

With a series of small, clever touches, you can turn it into a high-quality haunted house café.

Fantasy Cafe

A must-see for lovers of magic and mysterious worlds! A recommended fantasy cafe for the Halloween season! [Fun] #shorts #cafe #Halloween #sweets #fun #instagrammable #magic #mystery #fantasy #Shizuoka
Fantasy Cafe

Another recommendation is a fantasy-themed café that combines the currently popular quizzes and puzzles with a fantasy world.

It’s fine to draw the fantasy elements from the worlds of Harry Potter or Alice in Wonderland! When serving drinks at the café, adding a small puzzle will boost that school-festival excitement.

If customers can’t crack the code on the cookie box and can’t eat the cookies unless they solve it, it’s sure to fire everyone up.

For simple puzzles, refer to books on riddles and puzzle-solving.

Angel and Demon Cafe

https://www.tiktok.com/@angel_and_devil32/video/7360639050593684752

Do you know the angel-and-devil images that stirred up the internet a little while ago? Of course, they weren’t real angels or devils—it was an image contrasting actress Kanna Hashimoto styled as an angel and talent Ano-chan styled as a devil.

How about a concept café that uses those opposing angel-and-devil themes? For the angel side, you could center the menu around white, and for the devil side, focus on black, really emphasizing the contrast to make it easy to develop lots of items.

Cute white angel outfits and cool black devil outfits—both would probably be very popular!

Butler cafe

It’s also a great idea to use the popular butler café trend from across Japan as your theme.

A butler café is a place where staff treat you with the courtesy of a personal butler, letting you enjoy the atmosphere of being wealthy.

Think of it as the male counterpart to a maid café.

Of course, people of any gender can dress as butlers, or you could split it half-and-half with a maid café.

Start by studying behavior, language, and costumes that convey a butler-like presence.

You can also take inspiration from works that feature butlers as a theme.