If you’ve gone out to dinner recently, only to watch your friends check texts and Facebook on their phone the whole time, you may want to consider new friends. Or, if that’s too much hassle, a new restaurant. At least one eatery in the world is offering an enticing deal for those who forgo their in-meal entertainment for actual socializing.
Bedivere, a small pub in the Hamra neighborhood of Beirut, Lebanon, sought to reinstill some love for the art of conversation with a clever offer: leave your phone with them when you walk in the door and get 10 percent taken off your bill. That’s what we call a no-brainer—provided the wait staff aren’t secretly tweeting from your account the whole time.
An image of the poster advertising the discount turned up on Reddit and Imgur, soon bouncing to all corners of the globe, with thousands applauding the policy and hoping the idea might wash up on other shores. Though for the most part they revel in overconnection, the denizens of the Internet seemed happy to find an incentive for unplugging—even if just for the time it takes to eat a plate of moules frites.
The policy could very well catch on elsewhere, though naturally the wealthy jerks among us may continue to flaunt their iPhones over dinner, Instagram-bragging about the food they didn’t make and so forth. Personally, I would never deny myself the pleasure of Googling the restaurant’s health code violations while I wait for the appetizers.
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