Cosplay restaurants are theme restaurants and pubs that originated in Akihabara, Tokyo, Japan, around the late 1990s and early 2000s. They include maid cafés and butler cafés , where the service staff dress as elegant maids, or as butlers. The staff treat the customers as masters and mistresses in a private home rather than merely as café customers. Such restaurants and cafés have quickly become a staple of Japanese otaku culture.

Cosplay, a portmanteau of "costume play", is an activity and performance art in which participants called cosplayers wear costumes and fashion accessories to represent a specific character. Cosplayers often interact to create a subculture, and a broader use of the term "cosplay" applies to any costumed role-playing in venues apart from the stage. Any entity that lends itself to dramatic interpretation may be taken up as a subject. Favorite sources include anime, cartoons, comic books, manga, television series, rock music performances, video games and in some cases, original characters. The term is composed of the two aforementioned counterparts – costume and role play.