LA Restaurant Pays Diners to Put Cell Phones Away

Get off your damn phone already: A restaurant in Los Angeles is offering a 5% discount to customers who voluntarily give up their cell phones during dinner. Mark Gold, chef and owner of Eva Restaurant, tells KPCC the policy isn't "about people disrupting other guests...It's about two people sitting together and just connecting, without the distraction of a phone." Great. Or, depending on your dining companions, terrible. But at least you're saving money.

Servers offer to check diners' phones when they're seated, and apparently "a little less than half" of them have taken the restaurant up on the deal. And the other half nervously clutch their phones all the way through dinner in order to totally ignore the people they're eating with and/or play Angry Birds? Gold clarifies that "no one has gotten upset" about the deal.

Anyway, this is the first reported instance of a restaurant policy like this, although others have no camera policies. Supposedly there is a trend of "cell phone stacking" in which the first person at a table to touch his/her phone pays for everyone's meal, but hey: Eva's way, everyone saves a little money, and caving into the smart phone addiction is simply not an option.

· LA Restaurant Offers Discount For Dining Without Your Phone [KPCC via Gawker]
· All Cell Phone Coverage on Eater [-E-]