Featured image: Claridges. Photograph by Ian Usher via Flickr.
Guest writer Christopher Golds ponders the problem of phones in restaurants.
One of the things that I think earns me my Foursquare culture badge is my delight in going out. I love London and constantly feel as though I’m living in a movie as I wander around the city. apart from visiting the museums, art galleries, parks and theatres of our beloved capital city, some of the best places to experience London culture are our restaurants. This is also the reason I have earned the Foursquare ‘fatty boom boom’ badge.
There is a plethora of websites and apps out there that will give you more information on atmosphere, food and dining experiences. But have you ever considered visiting a restaurant where your mobile was not a useful tool, but something that was forbidden and banished from the table? would you still go?
Such a restaurant already exists in the United States. before dining at the Rogue24 restaurant in Washington DC, patrons have to sign a contract that prohibits the use of mobile phones and cameras during meals. This has got me thinking, and I ask in the same style as Carrie Bradshaw: have we allowed the mobile phone to eat into our dining experience?. Pun sadly intended.
Mobiles are a massive part of everyday life: apart from our keys and our wallets they are the thing most of us never leave the house with. mine is glued to me – the 20 days I spent this year without one after I was mugged were the most harrowing of my life. I jest, of course, but few of us can last very long before taking them out of our pockets. we are used to being told not to use our mobile in certain places: museums, the quiet carriage, airplanes and even churches – although I confess I have used mine in all of the aforementioned locales.
Do we really need a contract, though? it seems a little heavy handed: after all, it’s a restaurant, not the R&D department at Apple HQ. there are already many restaurants around the world with discreet policies of frowning upon mobile phone usage. I was recently lucky enough to be dining at one of London’s most famous hotels, Claridges. we were presented with the most beautiful, breathtaking display of canapés I have ever seen (and believe me I’ve seen a few). To say that I nearly died of embarrassment when a friend I was dining with got out his phone and took a photo, complete with flash and a horrendously loud shutter click, would be a gross understatement. But if we had signed next to the X would we have been escorted out of there by big security guards following our breach of contract?
While some places discourage the use of mobile phones, others positively encourage it. it is now possible to browse a menu on your iPhone, reserve a table and even order using an app so that your food is almost ready when you arrive. In some bars and pubs you can control the music using the Secret DJ app. The Wolseley is famous for its relaxed atmosphere suitable for that business brunch or dinner: when I was there recently (I’m not name-dropping: I love KFC, too) no one would bat an eyelid if you took your BlackBerry or iPhone out to check an email.
My Twitter feed is full of people posting every detail of their dining experience: checking in on Foursquare, taking pictures of their dish, adding a pretty filter and posting it to Instagram. I have a ‘friend’ who has checked Grindr to see if the hot waiter is playing for the same team. I’ve even heard of someone using the receipt to track down a waiter on Facebook and subsequently poking him. ‘You were served today by John McHottie’ can be very useful, apparently. I was recently in a branch of Giraffe and we took a snap of a particularly stunning waiter. we posted it on Twitter with the #HottieOrNottie hashtag, only to have the restaurant send us a pic of the snap we took pinned up on their staff notice board with the title of ‘Mr Southbank’.
Personally, I think it comes down to good old-fashioned manners and the calibre of the restaurant in which you are dining. I like the traditional dining experience that you get in five-star restaurants: a proper leather-bound menu full of dishes you can’t pronounce should be matched by an elegant room full of people who probably just have a pay-as-you-go Nokia in the car ‘in-case of emergency’.
I equally like going into an uber-cool and trendy sushi restaurant, scanning the QX barcode in their menu, which automatically tags me as there on Facebook, gives me details of a special offer using Foursquare and tells me what other diners like to eat using the Top Table app. The way some restaurants have incorporated technology often astounds me. Lord knows the simplest improvement many eating establishments could make is adding more plug sockets. If you carry an iPhone you’re likely to be carrying a charger too, because there is nothing more haunting than watching your battery percentage constantly crawl downwards. I unashamedly plug myself in wherever I go, often going as far as to ask to sit somewhere near a plug. As I write I realise how sad that is.
I don’t think a contract to put down the phone is needed. Restaurants shouldn’t restrict: they should offer choice. Commonsense should play a part in what is and what is not cool to do in a restaurant. Ignoring your fellow diners for the whole meal to chat to your followers on Twitter – not cool. Mouthing off on the phone in a candlelit restaurant about your latest deal in ‘mergers and acquisitions’ – not cool. Taking a photo of your family that your rarely see for the memory of a fun night out – cool. using whatever apps and tools the restaurant provides for you to make your meal easier or more amusing – cool. Checking Manhunt on a restaurant date – seriously not cool and you should be banned from ever being allowed to date again. This actually happened to me on a date – he said he didn’t know how to turn off notifications. I showed him how to turn off the phone (occasionally it is for the best). The moral of the story is: sometimes if you use your phone in the wrong place you will be eternally single, and we wouldn’t want that now, would we?
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