Women, Technology, Glitter Pancakes and Existential Unease at the Malibu Barbie Cafe

A time-honored tradition in journalism is the “stunt blog,” in which a reporter goes somewhere ridiculous and does something silly or foolhardy for the sake of having something to write about. At first glance, going to the New York location of the Malibu Barbie Cafe—a temporary pop-up at the South Street Seaport designed as a one-dimensional but spirited bit of PR for Barbie, the upcoming Barbie movie—is one such blog idea. On second glance, it is also still that. But, as this is a science and technology blog, and I am nominally, on some purely mechanical level, a science and technology blogger, the Malibu Barbie Cafe is also a unique place to consider the role of science and technology in Barbie’s life; at least, this is what social editor Emily Lipstein and I told our editors before taking several hours off in the middle of a Tuesday to eat glitter pancakes. 

To visit the Malibu Barbie Cafe at all requires the aid of technology; enormous QR codes on the side of the building lead to a link that allows you to make a reservation for the day and time of your choosing. (Besides flogging Barbie and also Barbie, the experience functions as a bit of an ad for Bucket Listers, the platform you use to book a ticket. Presumably the fact that they have been mentioned in the second paragraph of an article will be used in someone’s end-of-year Powerpoint on why they deserve a raise; go with God. And while we’re trapped inside this parenthetical together, let’s also be clear at the outset that the best restaurant review involving dolls has already been written, nearly a decade ago; it is simply pointless to try to match it, no matter how delirious the dining premise.) 

The Malibu Barbie Cafe is marketed as a vintage ‘70s experience, and that’s true right down to the inflation: adults will spend $22 a ticket plus a mandatory entree, each of which is $39; kids’ entrees cost $22. Curiously, you have to order your food ahead of time, leaving me to consider days ahead whether I was ready to tackle pancakes on a random weekday morning. (I was not. I also must note that, as press, our experience was comped; the Barbie Cafe’s PR seemed charmingly indifferent to what we might write and did not ask us to do, or not do, anything in particular.) 

Once inside, you are politely but repeatedly reminded that your dining experience will last a total of 90 minutes, which is, assuredly, plenty of time to eat a plate of glitter encased, sprinkle-filled pancakes with equally beglittered honey butter. It is also enough time to begin to regret putting all the glitter into your body and resolve, queasily, not to do that again, a lesson I carried throughout the rest of the next two days.

The Malibu Barbie Cafe is somewhat confused about its own ontological status: is it meant to be the kind of place that Barbie would visit, situated within the Barbie universe? Or is one meant to imagine oneself, as Camus would never put it, Barbie? There is, after all, a large pink box in which one can literally pretend to be a plastic-encased Barbie and some of her beach accessories: a boombox, a boogie board, a bike helmet, and what I am told is a very nice vintage Polaroid, a 600 series. (In what we might term vintage Barbie fashion, I texted my photographer boyfriend to ask about this; considering that Barbie became a National Geographic photojournalist in her modern era, she would presumably now know about camera models and would not need to do this, another way in which I am less successful than a doll.) 

So, where is the technology in the Malibu Barbie Cafe experience, you might ask faintly, already reaching to close this tab? Besides the camera and the small boombox, there’s also an enormous, purple, inoperable model of a boombox taking up one corner of the dining room. (It’s an object presumably totally foreign to the target audience here, delighted little girls with huge pink hair accessories and fantastic outfits and their exhausted parents.) And Barbie, as a doll, is of course a constantly-changing form of technology herself: She was launched in 1959 as nothing more aspirational than a beautiful, slim-hipped woman in an incredible bathing suit, before becoming the multi-careered Every Woman she is today. (The dolls also represent a novel, Atomic Age use for industrial byproducts like polyvinyl chloride, making her a rather overloaded symbol of modernity.) The cafe does not engage with Barbie’s nature or evolution, precisely, although you can buy some fun, cat-eyed white sunglasses that look like the ones Classic Barbie used to wear.

More encouragingly, there are also alcoholic drinks at the Barbie cafe, presumably a consolation prize for the parents and guardians who must sit therein; every drink can also be ordered virgin, in case you decide that pounding cocktails during your Barbie outing with your kid is, you know, a bad look. Emily and I ordered a virgin Beach Mojito, a lime and coconut concoction that came dusted, snowlike, in a cloud of white glitter. (“There was pink, but it ran out,” our lovely server told me.) It was undrinkable and sunscreenlike, but did create a beautiful silver pool when I accidentally spilled some on the table. I would have really enjoyed the whole thing when I was Barbie-demographic age, although I would have wanted more glitter, and, obviously, a miniature dining setup for my own doll. 

We drifted away from the table and into the Barbie shop. Barbie and her corporate overlords are of course known for having an iron-fisted, orc-like grasp on her IP, and the Barbie movie and accompanying accessory circus around exercises it to the full. Besides Malibu Barbie New York, there’s an identical cafe in Chicago, and, in Los Angeles, a towering, Mattel-backed World of Barbie exhibit, which first premiered in Toronto, and which makes no apparent mention of the movie, though it does seem timed to coincide with the hype around it. Mattel also launched a partnership with Forever 21, so that one can see the Barbie movie dressed in the appropriate style (pink), and, just to make sure the snake has fully ingested its own tale, a line of Barbie the Movie Barbie dolls launched on June 1. (Ken does not, in my opinion, look enough like Ryan Gosling.)  

But while the movie looks winkingly hip and surreal, designed to lure in horrible people like me, the restaurant is a charmingly irony-free zone: a place to feed your kids sparkle food and then buy them new dolls ($25). Barbie has had some 200+ careers over the course of her deathless life; the ones arrayed before us were a paramedic, an interior designer (with a prosthetic leg), a makeup artist, and a pop star. “You can be anything!” the tagline on each box assured us. We reflected, incorrectly, that Ken never seems to have a job, seemingly part of the joke of the movie, but which it turns out is not totally true.

Returning belatedly to the lumbering premise of this blog, Barbie’s relationship with tech is, of course, somewhat fraught, part of a larger issue about how to encourage girls to do STEM without being cringey or patronizing. (In general, one could say that Barbie represents an unsettled area in our cultural dialogue about how to encourage girls and women into nontraditional roles without being cringey or patronizing.) Barbie’s famed bimbo-ism has been a pop culture flashpoint for a very long time—long enough to have been a major plot point in a season 5 Simpsons episode, “Lisa vs. Malibu Stacy,” wherein Lisa is given a doll that utters phrases like “Don’t ask me, I’m just a girl.” She plans her own rival doll, Lisa Lionheart, which almost becomes a success, before Malibu Stacy is reissued with a fun new hat.

The past 30 or so years of Barbie can be read as something of a long, fumbling reaction to this reading of what she is, with often ludicrous results. In 2010, for example, she became a computer engineer, a decision that generated backlash when, in 2014, an accompanying book depicted her fumbling around unable to solve a coding problem until Ken and Scooter helped her. (The book was ultimately pulled and Mattel apologized.) The Barbie Cafe does not appear to have resolved any of the contradictions here – which would, after all, be a lot to ask of any cafe, tourist experience, or combination of the two. 

Back at our table, my glitter pancakes had arrived, along with Emily’s avocado toast, which was decorated with a little yellow flower. Our thoughts turned to women online; more specifically, the horde of incredibly weird Christian influencers with whom Emily is obsessed. (She has forever ruined my own For You page by constantly sending me these ladies’ musings on how they manage their barely-suppressed rage at their husbands and keep a spotless home.) 

The Christian influencers, Emily reflected, would hate the Malibu Barbie Cafe; they do not, for instance, particularly like bright colors and stick to a landscape of spotless oatmeal and beige. “They eschew society,” she said, “and would see all of this” as evidence of trends in modernity they detest: consumerism, women having careers, etc. 

“The crunchy moms and homesteaders,” Emily said serenely, “this is their worst nightmare.” One might ask what this signals about the role of Barbie;  if she has, as some of her weirder little detractors have insisted, gone “woke,” or if, instead, their own politics have become so frothingly retrograde that they are simply freaked out by a resolutely unmarried woman who has a lot of jobs and an enviable number of accessories. 

There was something charming about the delirious femininity of the experience: all the pink, the little fake snake plants on each table, the dozens of pink beach balls suspended on a net on the upper level, the inspiring quotes on the bathroom mirror: “Dreams are always in style!” rendered in pink, and, more threateningly, a blue “Feel the Kenergy.” 

“I feel like I’m in a McDonald’s play place,” Emily said, contentedly. We ate some parsley-dusted French fries—we had both been given fries, for some reason, though I did not exactly order them—which were as good as I’ve had in any other overpriced New York restaurant. They came with a frankly incredible garlic aioli that we both agreed we would happily eat by the jar; I would’ve eaten almost anything with it, including a lump of Barbie’s strawlike hair. 

“The problem with Barbie,” I said, accidentally eating an entire pat of shiny honey butter, instead, “was her lack of strong identity.” 

“If you can be anyone,” Emily agreed, “who are you?” 

We both agreed that there was a reason American Girl dolls so easily usurped Barbie's role in the American consciousness; besides having way better accessories and being more fun to play with, each AG came with interesting and fully fleshed-out storylines, rooting them in a cultural history, a sense of place. (The ability for Malibu Barbie Cafe visitors to pretend to be a giant Barbie in a box suggests Barbie is perhaps borrowing from the American Girl Place practice of making giant life-size dioramas.) 

The relentless Christian influencers, in their way, have a much easier time with technology, Emily pointed out—their livelihoods depend on it, much as they pretend otherwise—and a much stronger sense of self, for better or for worse. 

“The influencers know exactly who they are,” Emily said, “and they want everyone to be the same way.” 

Barbie, in this way, is not like them. She’s a bit of a cipher, we agreed, rootless, a seeker to an almost disturbing degree, probably vulnerable to joining a cult or an MLM. (Barbie was, in fact, an Avon lady at one point.) She would also, Emily pointed out, make an incredible televangelist, should she ever acquire religion. 

As I began to feel the effects of the glitter pancakes set in, we struggled to make sense of the Meaning of Barbie. 

“Be whatever you want?” Emily guessed. “Have a nice time?” She furrowed her brow, something Barbie certainly cannot do. 

“What does Barbie even stand for?” she said finally, as we prepared to make our way out of the Barbie machine, through which we’d been cranked with seamless professionalism. “She can’t even stand on her own. Not with those feet.”