Phone-free restaurants: Sardinia trials screenless family meals
Fifteen restaurants in ten Sardinian towns ask parents and children to put their devices in a basket for a month, and hand out board games designed with paediatricians.
Sardinia's trial of phone-free restaurants starts today, 1 November: for one month, 15 restaurants ask families to put their phones away for the whole meal, in a pilot called A tavola senza schermi, or "at the table without screens".
The scheme was presented in Cagliari by Anna Cau, Sardinia's regional ombudsman for children and adolescents, and Fipe Confcommercio Sardegna, the island's restaurant owners' association, led by Emanuele Frongia. The original plan counted on eight restaurants; 15 signed up, spread across Cagliari, Quartu Sant'Elena, Capoterra, Nuoro, Bari Sardo, Ussassai, Oristano, Alghero, Olbia and Santa Teresa Gallura.
How the phone-free restaurants pact works
The basket is the easy part; the real test is the diner who simply says no.
Nothing is confiscated. When a family sits down, staff offer a voluntary "table pact": phones go into a bag or a basket for the duration of the meal, the time is used to talk about the day, urgent calls are taken away from the table and any exceptions are agreed beforehand. Giuseppe Scura, director of Confcommercio Sud Sardegna, called the voluntary nature of the scheme its main strength.
To fill the wait between courses, each restaurant hands out a "Kit del Ritrovo" with board games for different ages, designed with the Italian federation of paediatricians, FIMP. The kit comes with a leaflet of paediatric advice and a QR code to the federation's full guide on children and digital technology.
The figures behind the project come from that guide: 95% of Italian adolescents use a smartphone regularly, one in four shows signs of problematic use, and 87% of parents say they need more information on managing their children's screen time. Cau told reporters the idea was neither to rely on bans alone nor to put the whole burden on parents; Frongia argued that adults have to set the example first.
Twelve compartments, biscuits and a 5% discount
Italian restaurants have tried this before, usually with a stick or a carrot. In the early 1990s, Italo Pedroni installed a wooden cabinet with twelve compartments for diners' phones at the Osteria di Rubbiara in Nonantola, near Modena. In 2016, Eataly's burger restaurant in Turin offered lockable "Black Phone Box" containers and rewarded guests who lasted the meal with biscuits. In Los Angeles, Eva Restaurant gave a 5% discount in 2012 to diners who left their phones at the door.
The Sardinian version differs in two ways: it targets families rather than adults, and it is run by a public children's office rather than a single owner, on an island whose dining rooms were last in the news for four new entries in the Michelin Guide Italy. Neither difference solves the hard part, which is the diner who simply says no.
The pilot runs until the end of November. After that, the promoters will decide whether to offer the scheme, still on a voluntary basis, to every Fipe Confcommercio Sardegna member restaurant. How participating families will be counted, and how success will be measured, has not been published.
