It is widely known that the hospitality sector was perhaps one of the most adversely affected industries in the pandemic. In every lockdown, restaurants and cafes were the first to shut, and since mere home delivery services are hardly enough to sustain the business, many iconic restaurants had to pull down their shutters. Even after two whole years, many people are wary of going out to restaurants to dine for the fear of catching an infection, which is making many restaurant owners innovate and think of ideas to bring diners back to restaurants by making ‘safe dining’ a feasible option for all.
The menus have been replaced by QR codes that can be scanned, bringing the menu in your own mobile phones, sanitisers are being kept on each table, and personal cutleries have started coming wrapped in a bag. In the previous year, Dragonfly restaurant in Delhi’s Aerocity also launched ‘personal dining pods’, where groups can be seated in their own well-sanitised pods in safe distance from other pods in the restaurant.
In Tokyo, a luxury restaurant Hoshinoya has launched lantern dining as a concept that is creating quite a stir online. These transparent lanterns are installed on dining tables that are meant to create a partition between individual diners, and because they are so thin, spacious (about 102 cms high and diameter of 65 cm) and transparent, you don’t quite feel that you aren’t with your near and dear ones, even though your head is practically inside a lantern.
With these lanterns, diners can apparently enjoy their meals while protecting against the risk of the Coronavirus. According to a Reuters report, these lantern-shaped transparent partitions have been created and designed by Japan’s traditional craftsmen. The dining experience doesn’t come very cheap. Guests who are staying at the hotel, would apparently have to pay 30,000 Yen (about 260 USD) as a venue charge, they can also invite their friends and other guests to dine with them under the partitions. Fascinated much? It is indeed something novel and has the ability to redefine the whole ‘safe dining’ wave that has swept across the world.
What do you think of the new lantern-dining concept? Do you think it can revolutionise the dining scene across the world, or will the trend find it difficult to sustain and fade away with time? Would you like to dine inside these lanterns with your friends? Do let us know.