Quick, there’s no time. I need to warn you about the TikTok Shrimp Dance Man. Don’t say his name out loud. It will only summon him. Keep calm, read this article straight through once, and then delete it from your email forever like it’s a coupon for one free conversation with Twitter founder Elon Musk.
When the TikTok shrimp dancing man was first brought to my attention, I knew I had to learn absolutely everything about him. He’s out there somewhere in the world, and if I don’t know exactly how to avoid him, he could find me and dance little shrimps sensuously across my tongue in front of an audience of horrified yet titillated shrimp lovers.
The shrimp dance is this guy’s whole deal. His TikTok channel is full of him doing this over and over again to men and women of all ages. Every time he plays the same song, “Earned It,” from the Fifty Shades of Grey soundtrack, both in the restaurant and in the TikTok. He’s like the Jeepers Creepers monster. Whenever the song begins, it means he’s on the prowl.
Everything about the shrimp dance is so aggressively horny, but the song is really what disturbs me the most. It’s such a horny song that the music video includes women in pasties and assless underwear making a human centipede. It’s so horny that the bar youtube has that tells you when people rewound to jerk off takes up the entire video. That is a level of horniness that shouldn’t be applied to shrimp.
When the shrimp dance man cranks up the Fifty Shades soundtrack and stalks around the tables looking for his next victim, the people in his restaurant cheer. They’re so aroused by the aggressive shrimp dance they’re about to experience that they’re filled with joy. The man has somehow converted a seafood restaurant into a horny shrimp perverts’ Medieval Times. There’s a bachelorette party atmosphere to the whole thing, but if you went to a strip club and asked for it, they would throw you out. You would be excommunicated from Chippendales for your dark crustacean desires.
There’s only one place on earth where a man will brush your teeth with shrimp and then give you a chloroform hug for your pleasure. It’s called Mr. Barbas Marisqueria or Mr. Beard’s Seafood Restaurant. It seems to have decent reviews on Google, and somehow, not a single one of them says “this son of a bitch shrimp danced me. He took little shrimps and danced them into my mouth while pelvic thrusting my chair. Ten stars, I mean one star.”
I’ve scoured and translated every shot of the menu I could find, and there doesn’t appear to be a sensual shrimp onslaught listed for sale. Maybe you can’t legally sell this type of experience? My best guess is that it’s something off the bar menu because the shrimpees are usually fed a clear shot at the end of the dance by the shrimper.
Mr. Beard also recently expanded his shrimp dance offerings to include a less invasive version of the shrimp dance that involves the customer licking a beer bottle he offers them and then sucking a shrimp from the top. I can’t imagine wanting attention bad enough that I’m willing to perform in public for seafood like a baby seal, but apparently, there are women out there who are so, so into this. All of the top comments are thirsty as hell to clap their flippers for the shrimp man.
“Where is this place at” is the only acceptable comment on these videos. I also want that information because I can imagine a scenario where I walk into a seafood restaurant excited for a nice meal. The lights dim, and suddenly, everyone is looking at me, my nightmare. Then a man comes over and touches my food with his hands, double nightmare. The food is being slapped against my lips aggressively. I pass out. I die of seafood mortification.
Imagine you didn’t know about the shrimp dance, and suddenly it was happening in front of you. Would you try and rescue the person being shrimped, or would your flight instinct kick in? Honestly, I’m not going to lie; I know who I am. I would trip a toddler to escape this man. I would yell, “This baby looooves shrimp!” and yeet them right into that cowboy hat as I sprinted away.
The performance is slightly different every time, so you can never prepare yourself for what’s about to happen. The mystery is part of the torture. Sometimes he sensually stirs salsa while wrapped around the shrimpee as if they’re recreating the pottery scene from Ghost. Sometimes all subtlety is abandoned, and it’s just a lot of pre-shrimp chair humping.
To add another layer to the horror parfait, Mr. Beard posted a few behind the scenes TikToks of himself preparing food in his kitchen while topless, wearing flip-flops and daisy dukes. Every single step of the food preparation process has to be sexy, health code be damned! You think Mr. Beard has read health and safety regulations? This man has only ever read one thing, and it’s The Kama Sutra, But With Shrimp.
The seafood horniness brand runs through all of Mr. Beard’s marketing. They don’t post the shrimp dances on Instagram, instead opting for a deceptively normal-looking social media campaign that involves close-up pictures of the food the restaurant offers. However, the captions on those pictures read like a book with shirtless Fabio on the cover. “Doesn’t your mouth water? Fill yourself with flavor directly from the sea, come and enjoy the best dishes; here I wait for you (address of the restaurant).” This is something a siren calls to a sailor she’s trying to drown.
When the shrimp dance man is not shrimp dancing or pantless stirring, he’s the owner and chef at Mr. Beard’s. When he’s not posting shrimp dance TikToks, he has a pretty typical online presence that includes a lot of gym content and some hustle culture bro power speeches about never giving up, following your dreams, and working hard. That would seem to imply that dancing shrimp is his dream, but it’s actually not. His dream is to own a restaurant; the shrimp dance is his golden cage.
In an older Tiktok, Mr. Beard explains that the shrimp dance is just something funny he did for a friend once that went viral on social media. Suddenly he had people coming into his restaurant begging for the sexy shrimp dance. He was a struggling restaurant owner, and it brought in business, so he danced for them. My God, did he dance. The shrimp has given him everything, and yet it’s also the bars of his fishy prison.
Even after scouring social media, running captions and TikToks through Google translate, and consulting with several seafood psychics, I still have questions about the Shrimp Dance Man, the kind of questions that can only be answered by visiting him in person and experiencing the terror of his art. Welp, it looks like those questions will have to remain forever unanswered. I’m not an idiot. I’m not wandering into that dark basement alone. You’ll shrimp dance me when I’m DEAD.
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