Fifteen Sardinian Restaurants Ask Families to Put the Phone Away

Fifteen restaurants in Sardinia have joined a trial scheme that asks families to put away smartphones and other devices while they eat, in the hope that they will talk to one another instead. According to the Guardian, the initiative is called A tavola senza schermi — at the table without screens — and its stated purpose is to encourage parents and children to hold a conversation across the table.

The scale is modest and so are the means. The Guardian describes a group of fifteen establishments and no more: the report carries no enforcement mechanism, no list of participating restaurants, no indication of how long the experiment will run, and no detail on whether it applies to every table or only to families with children. A house rule of this kind is only as strong as the willingness of guests to accept it, and the report does not say what a restaurant does when a diner declines.

What makes the scheme noteworthy is less its size than what it assumes about the meal. Dining out in Sardinia, as across Italy, is treated as an occasion rather than a transaction, and a restaurant that asks to be given a family's full attention is making a cultural argument as much as a commercial one. That the story travelled as far as the Guardian suggests how legible that argument is to readers abroad.