Smile, You’re on Camera-in a Restaurant

THE NEXT TIME YOU’RE DINING at the Bombay Cricket Club near the Crescent, or India Palace, its sister restaurant in North Dallas, be certain your tie’s on straight and you’re chatting with a person you wouldn’t mind being caught with on camera.

Each of these restaurants has cameras pointed at its patrons in the dining area, which management claims is in case of robbery. Neither has a sign alerting customers to the practice. Is this common in Dallas restaurants?

“I would imagine it’s not that uncommon,” says Dawn Jantsch, executive director of the Dallas Restaurant Association. “If you have to identify someone after a robbery, or if customers are engaging in petty theft, such as taking those wonderful knives they have at steak houses these days, that’s $20 to the restaurant. It doesn’t surprise me, nor do I think it’s a bad idea.”

At The Mansion, where the grounds-but not the dining room-are scanned by surveillance cameras, maitre d’ Wayne Broadwell strongly disagrees. “I think it’s just terrible! It’s an invasion of privacy. One of the things you want when you go to a nice dining establishment-along with the cuisine and the environment-is privacy. It’s always been our philosophy to ensure our guests’ privacy.”

None of the more than 500 restaurants owned by Brinker International (Chili’s, Macaroni Grill, Cozymel s) uses dining room cameras, says company spokesman Harry Day. “We haven’t in the past, we don’t presently, and we don’t have any plans in the future,” Day says. “We’re not a bank, and it’s not as if the crime rates in restaurants are extremely high. You just have too many people in a restaurant for a criminal to want to come. They shy away from big crowds, so we don’t need to do that.”