Restaurant offers free food for attractive customers

A restaurant in China has introduced an innovative marketing scheme under which it offers free food to good-looking diners.

A Korean food restaurant in Zhengzhou, central Henan province, announced that every day for the next month, its 50 most attractive customers will not have to pay for their meals.

Customers have their face scanned when they enter the restaurant. The scans are then sent to a nearby plastic surgery clinic, whose staff judge which diners are the most attractive. The five with the top marks every half hour get their meal for free.

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This isn't the first time a Chinese restaurant has offered such a deal. Free food was also given out to a select group of customers by a different restaurant in 2014, the BBC reports, but that restaurant had a rather different gimmick.

The Na Huo eatery in Chongqing, south-west China, offered discounts for men which increased as the customer's weight increased. Controversially, the opposite was true for female customers whose meal would go down in price as did their weight. Any male over 140 kg (22 stone) and any female under 34.5 kg (5st 6lb) ate at the restaurant for free.

A similar deal was offered in 2010 in a restaurant called The Heart Attack Grill in Las Vegas, which gave away free burgers to anyone who weighs over 158 kg (25 stone), Time reports. But the deal has subsequently been cancelled and the restaurant's owner now advocates healthier eating practices, the BBC says.