Gadgets & Tech

The best gimmick a restaurant can use is to serve excellent food, hopefully with efficient service. Failing that, the next best thing is… Well, anything really. Stupid menus where you have to read off food combos on a grid and tick the right box, like a math test. Waitresses in tight shorts and t-shirts. And now, iPads instead of menus.

That’s just what the “Do at the View” pizza restaurant is doing in Atlanta, Georgia, where you get an iPad instead of a paper menu when you sit at your table. Using the tablet, you can browse the “musically-inspired” (“do” is pronounced “dough,” as in do, re, mi. Get it?) dishes, call your car out of valet parking and change the music playing in the restaurant. You can also enter into the restaurant’s private chatroom and harass fellow guests.

It doesn’t stop there. In the bathrooms, you’ll find iPads on the walls instead of mirrors. In fact, the whole place seems to be designed to stop you from relaxing. Not only do you have to do your own ordering and music-choosing, you also have to contend with graphic displays covering the walls which flicker and flash like an iTunes visualizer.

Despite all this, the menu is priced very reasonably. And thanks to all the iPad-friendliness, Do at the View has a non-Flash website, meaning it is probably the only Web site in the world that can be viewed on a cellphone.

Restaurant site [Do at the View via Cult of Mac]

See Also:

• Your Restaurant's Next Menu Is An iPad
• Illuminated Menus Help Diners Decide in the Dark

Gadget Lab

Tags: iPads, Menus, Mirrors, Restaurant, Restroom, uses