DRIVE-IN CINEMAS AND DINING BEHIND PLASTIC, THE NEW GOING OUT

LONDON: With lockdown measures more relaxed, social lives are slowly becoming possible. Restaurants, bars, gigs and museums beckon. But as we take our first cautious steps back into the wider world, we are finding it transformed. Gone are restaurants so busy that you have to wait for service or the check. Now, in the coronavirus-era, social distancing has made eating out a very different experience.

At Da Enzo’s in Rome, waiters no longer hand out menus, but hold up a scan code. Customers point their smart phones at it and a menu pops up on screen with the day’s specialties. Dining companions - from the same household, please - might eat around a candle-lit table inside a glass booth on the banks of an Amsterdam canal, a concept being tried out by the ETEN restaurant. If that doesn’t appeal, diners can try eating with a see-through lampshade on their heads, created by French designer Christophe Gernigon for restaurant owners who want to protect customers from Covid-19. Other designs on the market resemble visitor booths in prisons, Gernigon said, prompting him to create a cylinder of transparent plastic that hangs from the ceiling, much like a lampshade.

“I wanted to make it more glamorous, more pretty,” he said.