Eating Blind

I forgot to mention that Babagenouche and I had the most amazing restaurant experience 10 days ago. We booked a reservation at Dans Le Noir to celebrate her birthday.

Here's the concept:

You eat completely in the dark and are shown to your table and waited on by blind people.

This way the experience of eating is all about the taste, touch and smell of the food.

Oh...and they don't tell you what you'll be eating. You can order seafood, meat, vegetarian and that's it. You get 3 courses and they tell you at the end.

In addition to this the restaurant neatly inverts the normal relationship between the sighted and the blind. Suddenly you're relying on them to "see" for you.

I thought...yeah sure it's dark...I'm sure there's a little light in there.

Nope!

It was crazy. I was really nervous when we were first shown to the dark area by our waiter. I't also quite crowded and loud and I was very disoriented. My sense of touch exploded as did my sense of hearing. I sat down and felt around the table to discover two glasses in front of me and a napkin wrapped around my cutlery. It was daunting at first. We'd actually ordered a bottle of wine and had a bottle of water on the table as well. Try pouring when you can't see anything! You have to stick your finger in the glass to feel when it's going to over flow.

The first course came and I quickly discarded the cutlery. I couldn't use it properly and I had to feel my food to figure out where it was (and try and ascertain WHAT it was).

The food was good through the courses but I wouldn't recommend the veggie option. Gen got the fish and it was WAY better. Desert was an unbelievably rich chocolate mousse. Yum.

We stumbled out blinking into the half lit bar at the end and they showed us what we'd had.

Great experience!

Plus...it was started by a charity for the blind as a way of educating people about the blind and helping the blind find employment. Everyone's a winner!