The Amsterdam Restaurant Using Individual Greenhouses For Social Distancing
With Dutch restaurants, bars and other catering services engulfed in uncertainty over how they might adjust to the 1.5-meter society, one Amsterdam restaurant is set to experiment with a brand new way of condoning off its guests: Using enclosed greenhouses.
Mediamatic ETEN, part of a larger arts and entrepreneurship center focusing on sustainability, is a vegan restaurant located on the Dijksgracht in the Oosterdok neighborhood of Amsterdam. From May 21, the restaurant will begin taking in guests, only this time they will be seated inside Serres Séparées ('separated greenhouses'), enclosed glass structures each equipped with a table for two or three diners.
"This was one of the most feasible ideas from a large list of ideas we had when brainstorming," Mediamatic's founding partner Willem Velthoven told NL Times, pointing out that the public reception has so far been enthusiastic. "We only had tickets for June and the last week of May online and they are now all sold out," he said.
Initially, no more than three guests will be allowed to dine inside each greenhouse, even though there is the capacity for more. "[This is] is because we are now careful with our optimism," Velthoven explained.
"We have other, bigger greenhouses, but using them depends on how everything ends up going. Bigger groups could [come] now but then they should be families. For now, bigger groups are being discouraged because, from our experience, they are just louder and then you get the excited behavior causing spittle to fly and so on, and that's the kind of behavior that would make the virus spread faster," Velthoven said.
