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Rick Nichols: Unplugging a wine bar to let the conversation pour forth

No, protests Jon Myerow, who owns a couple of craft-beer-and-cheese-centric Tria cafes in Center City, he's not a Luddite. He's as addicted to his BlackBerry as the next guy.

No, protests Jon Myerow, who owns a couple of craft-beer-and-cheese-centric Tria cafes in Center City, he's not a Luddite. He's as addicted to his BlackBerry as the next guy.

But there's a time and a place: "When you're out with friends, we should be with friends."

Which of course is how it should be. (Or even among strangers, for that matter, who might have something rather exciting to offer.)

But that's not quite how it often goes down these days - laptop zombies lurking in Starbucks, dates dumped (for 10 full minutes at a time) to answer texts, silent ESPN crawls above the bar, as distracting as snakes on a plane.

So with his third place - a 32-seat noon-till-midnight wine bar, Biba - set to open in a few weeks at 31st and Walnut, Myerow is proclaiming the amenities he won't be including, among them WiFi, televisions, live music, karaoke, or "other time-filling diversions" (clocks, maybe?).

He's not going to be patrolling the aisles, scolding couples to peer deeply into each other's eyes. But he's not going to be the one to enable them to escape the evening on an electronic carpet; "we're trying to get them to hang out; have a glass of wine."

So we come sort of full circle - or at least Myerow has - from the days 10 years ago when restaurateur Stephen Starr declared that dining wasn't about the food so much anymore as the theater.

The Biba concept is about stripping the theater out, putting the spotlight back on the diners: "They always write about Tria that it's trendy. But it's about wine and beer and talking to people. That's not trendy; that's ancient."

Actually, you can feel the hunger out there. Even in the economic downturn, conversation-friendly sidewalk cafe seats in Center City have jumped another 8 percent. And there's been an uptick in serious-minded, TV-free cocktail bars, among them Franklin Mortgage and the dim-lit Ranstead Room.

It's not as if the old media never acted as a barrier to personal contact. The image of the newspaper raised like a wall at the breakfast table is a black-and-white movie staple.

Still, let us raise a glass to Biba, whose tiny patio, Myerow says, will be a "haven for social interaction," that warm-blooded thing that predated the distancing, Orwellian interloper - social networking.

I have promised to buy my colleague Karen Heller a drink to celebrate the joint's opening.

She introduced me to the phrase "inattentional blindness" in a column on "The High-tech Disconnect" this month, quoting scientists who warn of the smart phone's power to blank out your awareness of your immediate context or surroundings.

I won't be surprised if we see it framed as a come-on above Biba's bar: "Help prevent inattentional blindness!"

Biba