This Restaurant Lets Pretty People Eat For Free
Photo: Graeme Montgomery/Trunk Archive
If you’re hungry, in the middle of China, and drop-dead gorgeous, great news: You get to eat for free. As the Telegraph reports, Jeju Island, a Korean restaurant in Zhengzhou, is offering gratis meals to the 50 best-looking diners each day.
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To partake, restaurant guests must go to a special “beauty identification area,” which consists of a touch-screen pad and camera. There, guests are photographed before eating. A panel of local cosmetic surgeons then evaluates diners’ looks, and those deemed most beautiful don’t have to pay. (The rest of the guests, we’d wager, are potential customers for those surgeons.)
Photo: Corbis
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As a way to drum up publicity, it’s a pretty savvy move, but doling out appearance-based advantages is nothing new. Side, a boutique hotel in Hamburg, Germany, has a special that lets guests pay their weight in Euros—the less you weigh, the less you pay. And at Twin Peaks, an American Hooters-style chain, employees are subject to a daily “performance review” in which their hair, makeup, and fitness are evaluated.
But let’s get back to China, where the Jeju Island promotion isn’t going over well with local officials. Believing that the promotion damaged the city’s reputation, they demolished the restaurant’s “Free meal for goodlooking” sign earlier this week. Perhaps they believe that beauty is subjective, or just that there’s truly no such thing as a free lunch—not even if you’re pretty.
