“Your wine glass is on the right, water on the left. Bon appetit.” That’s all they say before leaving us in the dark, or, in this case, Dans le Noir, a restaurant in Paris that gives new meaning to the concept of blind tasting.
Enter the brightly-lit bar, crammed with young trendies, and you could be in any urban restaurant. Except there’s an alcove for seeing-eye dogs. And they confiscate cell-phones, watches and anything else luminous and suggest you visit the john now or forever hold your piss.
We order before entering the dining room. My date opts for the surprise menu. Then our waitress emerges from within. Caroline has beautiful chocolate skin, meticulous cornrows and eyes that roll up in her head. She’s blind. “Put your hand on my shoulder and follow me,” she says, and leads us through a curtain into pitch darkness. “We’re turning right, now left. Feel these two tables? Go between them and sit down.” I sink onto a bench and right away realize there’s someone next to me. A girl. I presume seating is carefully arranged to minimize groping; after all, we’re in France. Infrared cameras monitor the room, in case of a complaint.
Total dark makes some people claustrophobic. Waiters spend as much time calming nerves as serving. Diners around us are talking a little too loudly; whistling, as it were, in the dark, and bonding across tables, in their common disorientation, with strangers in the night.
I find the blackout peaceful and oddly familiar. Like dreaming. My mind’s eye vividly populates the void with tables, waiters and walls. I ponder how people who are born blind go about mentally organizing the space around them.
Conversation is difficult for me; without eye contact my attention keeps drifting off. I catch myself in bizarre listening postures; cranked way over to one side, chin and eyes aimed at the invisible ceiling. Then I remember the infrared camera and snap to attention.
The restaurant grew from a project of the Paul Guinot Society, formed just after World War I to promote culture, sports, policy and jobs for the blind. Le Goût du Noir (Taste of the Dark) was a series of blind soirées meant to jolt people out of their normal preconceptions through the shock of role reversal. Most of us, paralyzed by political correctness – do you pity? offer help? - have little contact with the blind. Here, in their kingdom of darkness, they are your Boy Scout leader, Sherpa and life-line.
The restaurant employs 12 full-time blind waiters. It also hosts debates, dating nights, business meetings, and inevitably, in a setting that, stifling one sense, puts the others on orange alert, wine tastings. I’d been looking forward to an extra-sensory wine experience. Alas, our wine, once I manage to get as much into the glass as I spill on the table, is breathtakingly awful. Contemplating a new low in the annals of wine-snobbery, I ponder: do you send a bottle back in a blind restaurant? Yes! For once, I’m glad to know a waiter’s name. I call out to the all-powerful Caroline who is instantly by my side. The replacement bottle is scarcely better.
Food is another story. After a tentative stab or two, I dispense with the fork. Like a golf club, it’s clearly way too long for meaningful contact. Instead, I plunge right in and violate all the etiquettes of societies that eat with their hands, using left and right indiscriminately and licking my fingers. Flavors burst alive. I’m struck by the startling beauty of juxtaposing sweet and salt, the heartrending poignancy of the savory flavor known as umami, represented here by grilled eggplant whose crunchy crust gives way to a meltingly creamy center.
I have my own little hedonistic orgy, dripping bits of fish and fruit into my mouth like a bit-player from Caligula. I became so deeply involved with the chocolate-hazelnut mousse I’m supposed to be sharing that my date never learns of its existence. Oh, well. Out of sight, out of mind.
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