"The Five Loaves and Two Fish" diner, a Biblically named restaurant in China has proved that while serving your neighbor with trust, love and food is laudable, it is not always profitable.
Since its opening in August, the restaurant has been serving up hot meals and coffee daily to a packed house in Fuzhou where customers are allowed to make the choice of how much they want to pay or whether they want to make a payment at all, Agence France Presse reported.
The eatery promotes a domestic atmosphere where the patrons are expected to wash their own dishes and drop however much money they want to pay into a box. One of the options is to leave without making a payment.
Named after a story of Jesus feeding the five thousand, the 24-hour city center eatery is famous for its seafood and local Fujianese cuisine, with specialities including garlic scallops, beef with scallions, and pickled pork, according to the AFP.
"We initially expected the restaurant to stay open for two months, and now it has lasted three," owner Liu Pengfei said. "The losses are not unbearable."
But according to its investors, the restaurant has lost 250,000 yuan ($41,000) since it opened since as many as one-fifth of diners choose to not pay anything at all.
Pengfei, 50, told the state-run China Daily newspaper in an October television interview that "what we care about most is not money, but trust."
But now, he wishes the customers would explain their reasons for not paying up and hopes to encourage them to contribute whatever they can for the restaurant to keep running successfully.
"They can tell me they don't have enough money, that's fine. But paying nothing and saying nothing is totally different," he told AFP. "Honesty is the first step to building trust. In my eyes, those who don't pay are sick."
