In Japan, a restaurant has banned customers from using their phones while eating
In Japanese ramen restaurants, there is an unspoken rule: eat quickly and leave. One owner takes this custom so seriously that he began to determine how long it takes for his customers to start eating.
He found that those who waited the longest to put their spoons in their bowls of soup were usually watching videos on their phones, which led him to take matters into his own hands, CNN reports.
Kota Kai owns and operates a Tokyo restaurant called Debu-chan (Japanese for "plump"), which will celebrate its fifth anniversary this June.
In March, he decided to ban customers from using their smartphones while eating during busy hours, a move that became a hot topic of conversation on social media in Japan.
"One day, we noticed a customer who hadn't started eating for four minutes," says Kai, adding that the customer was watching a video on his phone while his food was cooling in front of him.
In some places, this might not seem like a big deal. But Kai is serving Hakata ramen, a type of regional ramen from Hakata in Fukuoka Prefecture, which he says is "a food born for impatient people."
The owner of the restaurant says that the thin noodles he serves are only one millimeter wide, so they begin to stretch and spoil very quickly. By this logic, a four-minute wait can result in a moldy dish.
As TravelWise wrote, the small French town of Saint-Port (located near Paris) has decided to ban cell phones in public places.