Two former Iranian prisoners have opened a successful “jail restaurant” to help raise funds to free convicts languishing behind bars for unpaid debts.
A storefront picture of their Cell 16 diner in eastern Tehran shows a frustrated prisoner holding a chicken leg in one hand and trying with the other to bend the bars of his cell to escape.
The idea of the restaurant was hatched in prison.
Photo: AFP
“I met my partner while we were in police custody,” 31-year-old Benyamin Nakhat said. “I was working at the iron market in Tehran, but I went bankrupt. I found myself penniless.”
His business partner, Arman Alizadeh, a 30-year-old exporter, was also drowning in debt.
Iranian law is harsh on writing checks that bounce, and on the failure to pay agreed dowries or bank loans: Offenders are jailed until the money is repaid.
More than 11,000 Iranians are behind bars for failing to pay their debts, prison officials said.
That is almost five percent of Iran’s total prison population.
Two years after their release, the jail-time friends opened Cell 16, with its dining tables in separate prison cells.
“Decorating the place was easy, we just reproduced the place where we’d been held,” Nakhat said, smiling. “We wanted to show that prison isn’t necessarily a place filled with bad guys.”
“Inmates are sometimes people who haven’t committed crimes, but have had misfortune. It can happen to anyone,” he added.
With the help of social media, the business has been a success, having first opened in 2016 with just seven “cell” tables. It has expanded to two more eateries, in Tehran and the central city of Isfahan.
However, the owners have not forgotten their comrades in trouble.
“We want to help inmates by raising funds,” Alizadeh said. “We help indebted prisoners by sometimes launching campaigns for help from donors or clients.”
“We post the requests on our Instagram page and everyone contributes in their own way. Parts of the restaurant’s proceeds will also be used to help free prisoners,” Alizadeh added.
“It’s often the wives of prisoners who seek help. We choose those who seem to us to have priority: For example, a married person with children, or sick persons unable to work to repay a loan,” he said.
Several associations and celebrities are involved in such charities.
The Islamic Republic News Agency last year reported that US$130 million had been donated to repay the debts of thousands of prisoners.
Cell 16 also employs newly released prisoners.
Accompanied by her two friends, diner Hasti Berjissian, 24, a purchasing manager in a factory, likes the concept.
“We’ve been coming here since it opened,” she said, taking a bite of pizza. “The food is good, but above all, we want to help the prisoners.”
In another cell, Shiva Shemshaki, 33, celebrated her husband’s birthday.
“I come because a friend of ours has been in prison for nine months for unpaid debts. He had bought some goods but, because of inflation, he was ruined,” she said.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
The most powerful solar storm in more than two decades struck Earth on Friday, triggering spectacular celestial light shows from Tasmania to the UK — and threatening possible disruptions to satellites and power grids as it persists into the weekend. The first of several coronal mass ejections (CMEs) — expulsions of plasma and magnetic fields from the sun — came just after 4pm GMT, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center. It was later upgraded to an “extreme” geomagnetic storm — the first since the “Halloween Storms” of October 2003 caused blackouts in Sweden and damaged
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion
Experts have long warned about the threat posed by artificial intelligence (AI) going rogue, but a new research paper suggests it is already happening. AI systems, designed to be honest, have developed a troubling skill for deception, from tricking human players in online games of world conquest to hiring humans to solve “prove-you’re-not-a-robot” tests, a team of researchers said in the journal Patterns on Friday. While such examples might appear trivial, the underlying issues they expose could soon carry serious real-world consequences, said first author Peter Park, a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology specializing in AI existential safety. “These