Eat, drink, and be present: Restaurants and bars are starting to embrace cell phone bans

Imagine sitting with friends in front of a charcuterie board and a bottle of Syrah at a French bistro. If you reach for your smartphone, a waiter blows a referee’s whistle, issues you a “penalty card,” and tells you a second infraction will get you eighty-sixed. Such faux-pas enforcement is routine at Le Petit Jardin in Montpellier in southern France, which implemented a strict “no-phone use” policy in 2017. 

While this approach seems farcically extreme, the idea of restricting phone use in restaurants and bars is gaining traction in the U.S., and not just in the “coastal elite” cities. Sneaky’s Chicken, in Sioux City, Iowa, for example, offers compliance incentives: the long-beloved local fried chicken and wing joint now offers discounts every Wednesday night for diners who put their phones in a box. In Nashville, Tennessee, Monell’s is a family-style all-you-can-eat Southern comfort food restaurant that maintains a “no-phones-at-the-table” rule in order to encourage an authentic communal dining experience. Other places, typically ritzier, are starting to require patrons to relinquish their devices at the door, too. 

With phones at hand, “all of a sudden you hear the little ding or something, and your attention leaves your dining experience, and you’re in a different place,” says Kara Nielsen, a San Francisco Bay Area-based food trend expert with deep experience in the culinary world. She’s not surprised by the appeal of phone restrictions. “Experiential dining is getting very popular with younger people, and it definitely seems part of the millennials’ and Gen Z’s turn toward the analog. So, I think we’re going to see an increase in this type of phone-free experience in the future.” 

“Going out is a commitment, and guests are seeking out experiences like this.”

“If you can’t possibly deal without your phone for two hours, then this is not the place for you,” celebrity chef Tim Love told NBC not long after opening Caterina’s in Fort Worth, Texas, in 2022. The cozy, upscale Italian restaurant has maintained a strict no-phone policy that doesn’t seem to deter patronage, given the restaurant’s continued popularity. As Love said: “You’re, like, ‘I’m just going to sit here and enjoy myself.’ And that’s what happens. It’s been really refreshing.”

Britnee Wentworth is the assistant manager and lead bartender and server at Caterina’s. “I was part of the opening team . . . and at the very beginning, the cellphone policy did get a lot of questionable remarks, but I wouldn’t say that necessarily affected business in a negative way,” she says. “It’s actually been contributing to our business in a positive way, especially in the last year and a half or so. Once in a blue moon, we have somebody who is upset by the policy and chooses not to dine with us because of it. But I would say that’s few and far between at this point.”

Despite a common misconception, Wentworth says, the cellphone stays with the guest the entire time, in a locked pouch—“similar to what they use at comedy shows and concerts, so that definitely eases a lot of worry.” Echoing Nielsen, she says younger patrons seem “more excited about locking up their cellphones than the 50-and-above customers.”

One of the best parts of her job, Wentworth says, is getting to see the fortuitous outcomes that often occur when people are disconnected from their devices. “We have a lot of tables that leave becoming friends with the table next to them, even when there’s a generational gap between them, just because of the conversations that are started,” she says. “It’s definitely been one of the coolest social experiments to be a part of.” 

About 250 miles south, in San Antonio, Nicosi Dessert Bar opened in June 2024. The Michelin-starred establishment offers “an 8-course tasting menu of 4 bites and 4 mains” in an “intimate 20-seat venue that wraps around the kitchen, inviting guests into a show-and-tell journey alongside the chefs.” Cellphones and photography are prohibited. One Yelp reviewer remarked: “This all-dessert fine-dining experience was creative, unpretentious, interactive, and full of delicious surprises.” 

In Phoenix, the Trophy Room opened inside a high-end steakhouse and supper club in 2023. The swanky Arizona cocktail bar features an extensive drink menu, plenty of rich dark-wood paneling, and luxuriant furnishings, and is adorned with antique rifles and taxidermy-mounted animals that convey old-school hunting lodge aesthetics. Guests are instructed to check their phones in locked boxes contained within a vintage library card-catalog system.

“The Trophy Room is about intimacy and focusing on [what is] in front of you,” says cofounder and operating partner Thor Nguyen. It’s an “escape where there are no distractions, selfie lights, text vibrations . . . from our digital lives.”

As for the policy’s impact on business, Nguyen doesn’t think it “affects the bottom line at all. It actually gives our guests an experience, and for them, that’s value,” he says. “Going out is a commitment, and guests are seeking out experiences like this. For other business owners [considering cellphone restriction policies], if you do it, commit to it. You’ll get pushback, but those will be the guests that don’t get it. And that’s okay. You have to believe the intent and make sure you’re creating a complementary experience.”  

Antagonist, a cocktail bar in Charlotte, North Carolina, is slated to open later this year, and it promises on its website: “Strong drinks. Sharp dialogue. No phones. No distractions.”

The list goes on—and is growing.

The future of unplugging

Restaurants began introducing QR codes for menu access in response to COVID, but they’ve since become ubiquitous. While they may offer a convenient transaction method for getting fast food or coffee at the airport, they also represent a presumptuous push toward a more automated world that contradicts the industry’s foundational promise, and the experience we so crave: to break bread and connect.

Meanwhile, an endless stream of ink continues to track the perils of our cellphone-centric lives. In 2013, studies revealed how reliance on cameras impairs memory—the “photo-taking-impairment effect”—and, in effect, dulls our actual experience of life. Research in 2014 found that cellphone use leads to significant changes in brain activity, reaction time, and sleep patterns, and subsequent research has linked it to higher risks of Alzheimer’s disease.

Other studies directly correlate cellphone and social media use with a range of mental health issues, especially for young people. In fact, the current landmark lawsuits against Meta (Instagram) and Google (YouTube) are focused on issues of youth safety and the addictive nature of their platform designs.

As noted last year in a Washington Post piece about the positive response to phone bans in local D.C. bars, “there is a dawning realization that this constant exposure to the digital world makes us feel less connected to the real one.” 

Julio Alvarez is a leadership coach, podcaster, and former tech executive who’s been on both sides of the screen, and he senses a seismic shift underway. “To actually be present with another human being in an exchange, in a real connection—that’s becoming the rarest commodity,” he says.

With the advent of AI, Alvarez is hopeful the screen-free trend will expand beyond the food and beverage sector. 

“We’re going to enter a new phase, with an opportunity to combat our addiction to screens with whatever new tech comes out over the next decade,” he says. “There’s a lot of positioning around not adding new screens, but removing them. And what is that going to do? It’s going to force us to deepen our connectivity skills . . . and be present with one another again.”

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