Please, turn down the volume on the world...
After a long week of extra-long days at work, I didn't really feel much like cooking last night, so daddysir and I went to a local restaurant, hoping we could find some SBD Phase 1 legal stuff on the menu. Turned out that was enormous Cobb Salads that really weren't quite as good as the California Cobbs from McDonald's. Adding to the unsatisfactory nature of our dinner was the noise level in the place.
Granted, there was one moron three tables away from who us kept shouting at his dinner companions in a donkey-like bray that was audible throughout the restaurant, but every other noise in the place was magnified, intensified by all the hard surfaces of plaster, tile, metal, and glass. I wish I could say this was the only place we've been recently that has such excruciating acoustics, but I'm afraid there are hundreds (maybe thousands) of places like this one. What I find most disturbing about this trend in restaurant design is the strange auditory phenomenon that occurs when the collective noise of the room and the arrangement of hard surfaces make it impossible to hear the normal speaking voice of your dining companion while you can make out clearly the shouted snatches of conversation taking place at a table on the other side of the room.
The restaurants of my childhood were not like this. They were plush and hushed and utterly luscious. I remember the soft scuff of my Mary-Janes across thickly padded carmine carpeting and the whisper of my skirt settling onto the upholstered seat of a chair or booth. I remember hearing music (something instrumental or maybe Frank Sinatra) in the background, loud enough to drown out the conversations happening at other tables, but low enough to recede into the background and allow us all to hear each other at our own table. And I'm not talking about a high-end "boy-howdy-we-got-something-fancy-to-celebrate" restaurant here. This was just our local family Italian joint. But it was comfortable. And comforting.
And that's what I'm really missing, I suppose: the comfort of quiet in a public space, of feeling like something a little special might be going on. A hint of luxury or decadence snatched from a commonplace occurrence. Restaurants these days, and movie theaters now that I think of it, are cursed by cacophony, by the twisted oxymoron of "casual elegance." We shout to be heard above the clatter, above each other, above the jukebox and the Muzak, above the ubiquitous flat-screen tvs blaring sport-ball games and infotainment. When the shouting gets too loud, the restaurant turns up the volume on the "ambiance" and tears out the last scrap of carpeting to make way for poured concrete that soaks up neither beer nor babel.
It's probably not surprising, then, that we came home and chose to spend the evening drinking tea and reading books, comforted by the great relief of silence.
Granted, there was one moron three tables away from who us kept shouting at his dinner companions in a donkey-like bray that was audible throughout the restaurant, but every other noise in the place was magnified, intensified by all the hard surfaces of plaster, tile, metal, and glass. I wish I could say this was the only place we've been recently that has such excruciating acoustics, but I'm afraid there are hundreds (maybe thousands) of places like this one. What I find most disturbing about this trend in restaurant design is the strange auditory phenomenon that occurs when the collective noise of the room and the arrangement of hard surfaces make it impossible to hear the normal speaking voice of your dining companion while you can make out clearly the shouted snatches of conversation taking place at a table on the other side of the room.
The restaurants of my childhood were not like this. They were plush and hushed and utterly luscious. I remember the soft scuff of my Mary-Janes across thickly padded carmine carpeting and the whisper of my skirt settling onto the upholstered seat of a chair or booth. I remember hearing music (something instrumental or maybe Frank Sinatra) in the background, loud enough to drown out the conversations happening at other tables, but low enough to recede into the background and allow us all to hear each other at our own table. And I'm not talking about a high-end "boy-howdy-we-got-something-fancy-to-celebrate" restaurant here. This was just our local family Italian joint. But it was comfortable. And comforting.
And that's what I'm really missing, I suppose: the comfort of quiet in a public space, of feeling like something a little special might be going on. A hint of luxury or decadence snatched from a commonplace occurrence. Restaurants these days, and movie theaters now that I think of it, are cursed by cacophony, by the twisted oxymoron of "casual elegance." We shout to be heard above the clatter, above each other, above the jukebox and the Muzak, above the ubiquitous flat-screen tvs blaring sport-ball games and infotainment. When the shouting gets too loud, the restaurant turns up the volume on the "ambiance" and tears out the last scrap of carpeting to make way for poured concrete that soaks up neither beer nor babel.
It's probably not surprising, then, that we came home and chose to spend the evening drinking tea and reading books, comforted by the great relief of silence.