In an unfamiliar restaurant, in an unfamiliar city, T and I are trying, menus in hand, to have a conversation.
“I’m enjoying the weekend,” I say, rictus grin stretched across my face.
“Mmm?” he replies.
“I said: I’m enjoying the weekend.”
“What?” he replies, a little irritably, which means I’m already beginning to enjoy the weekend rather less.
Third time lucky? “I’M ENJOYING THE WEEKEND,” I shout.
“SORRY. I CAN’T HEAR A WORD YOU’RE SAYING,” he yells back.
For a few minutes, we struggle on. When I tell him I’m going to have the cod, he thinks I’m talking about my credit card. When I suggest he might like the pasta, he thinks I’m urging him to choose faster. Finally, our eyes meet. No confusion this time. “Shall we just go?” he says, nodding in the direction of the door. Two seconds later, and we’re outside in the street. A tram is rattling by, and somewhere in the distance I can hear a police siren. All the same, what bliss it is to breathe the cool night air. What perfect peace!
Are restaurants getting louder? Yes. Everyone knows that they are, the din bouncing off their scratchy minimalist interiors like never before – for which reason, the charity Action on Hearing Loss, having written to no fewer than 70 restaurant groups offering advice about the problem of excessive noise, and having received in return no replies at all, is now funding the development of a mobile phone app that will enable customers to record decibel levels when they go out to eat. The idea is that, duly named and shamed, the noisiest offenders will perhaps be minded to do something about the pain they seem so determined to inflict on diners and, far worse, their own long-suffering staff.
Will this work? I bet it won’t. Last year, after all, a certain tabloid newspaper sent reporters armed with decibel recorders to various well-known restaurants. The results were enough to make you want to shove camembert in your ears. Two places had decibel levels of 107 and 110 (a normal conversation comes in at about 50 to 60 decibels, and a plane taking off at 180 decibels; experts advise it is unwise to endure more than an hour of noise at 94 decibels). Yet neither one of them seems to have done a thing about it since. Why? It’s obvious, isn’t it? In most averagely expensive restaurants, noise is now deemed to be a badge of honour, their staff smiling happily at you as they bawl the words: “TABLE FOR TWO?” It’s not only that a headache-inducing din is seen as a sign of success, a cacophony that will reassure silence-phobic customers they really have pitched up in a cool place. It helps to turn tables, too. Who wants to hang about if merely talking is going to leave you hoarse?
You might say that excessively noisy restaurants are neglecting their customer base – and you would be right. A recent survey suggests that four out of five people have left a restaurant because of noise, with nine in 10 of those saying they would not return. Somehow, though, this seems not to figure in the calculations of the establishments themselves. A new place near my house plays loud music over the voices of its daytime crowd. The restaurant is full anyway, the thinking seems to go, so why worry if a few people have only to open its door an inch – boom! – to run away? And while a single lingering table might well spend more than one that departs too swiftly, its bill still won’t be as big as those of two tables combined.
It’s about more than numbers though. A tolerance for extreme noise is, alas, just another aspect of what we might call the booming 21st-century restaurant industry’s near sadistic approach to customers: the same treat ’em mean, keep ’em keen attitude that brought us restaurants which refuse to take bookings, and maitre d’s who would rather stare at an iPad than meet your eye. (See also restaurants that expect you, the customer, to ring them to confirm a reservation you’ve already made, and restaurants that expect a deposit in exchange for a booking.) All this is beyond infuriating, of course – except we’ve only ourselves to blame. The customer, in these scenarios, might well seem to be a craven, masochistic figure, contemptible in his desperate willingness to be humiliated and kept in line all for the sake of a few small plates and a bottle of slightly filthy organic wine. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t still king. If only more of us walked, fingers in ears, things would change faster than you can shout “uproar”.
