I’m sitting at a table in a restaurant in France, famous for food and fine dining. I’ll explain why this is relevant to South Florida in a moment.
I may not be able to understand everything being said around me in French at my table in France. But I can hear every word.
I wonder how this is possible. The restaurant near Paris is full of workers on their lunch break, seated around tables of up to 10, talking boisterously over steaming plates of paté en croute, faux-filet grille and tarte tatin.
I may not be able to understand everything on the menu – does faux-filet mean a veggie burger? – but I can clearly hear my two table mates as they kindly translate the menu. (“No, faux-filet is NOT a veggie burger.”)
I’ve been noticing how much better I can hear in busy, big-city Paris restaurants than I can in almost any restaurant in South Florida.
How do the French do this, I wonder? What’s their secret to running a restaurant where you can hear the person sitting across or next to you even when the rest of the restaurant is buzzing at sawmill-levels of buzz?
Because we could use a little help with the sound levels in our restaurants. Tout de suite. Which means, roughly, immediatamente.
No names here, but I was sitting at a table in a restaurant in Fort Lauderdale recently that was so loud the decibel-level warning went off on my watch.
“Repeated, long-term exposure to sounds at this level can damage your hearing,’’ according to my watch.
Don’t get me wrong, I was ready to risk a little hearing damage for the baked clams oreganata. But I couldn’t hear a word my three table mates were saying. And that was before the band had even started to play.
After dinner with friends at another well-known-but-no-names-here restaurant in West Palm Beach, my wife said, “I enjoyed seeing them, but could you hear anything they were saying?”
I couldn’t, confirming on my decibel meter that my mushroom bao bun had come with a leaf-blower-level side of sound.
It’s gotten to the point we ask as much about the noise in a restaurant as we do about the food before making reservations. Type “quiet restaurant’’ into a local OpenTable search, and it returns three suggestions. Type “noisy’’ into the same search, and it returns 64 – including many restaurants whose names you’d probably recognize.
“Can you think of a South Florida restaurant where you can have a quiet conversation?” I asked a friend who eats out a lot in South Florida. “Our financial planner invited us to dinner to discuss our retirement plans, and we don’t want to miss a word.”
“Hmmm,” she said, after long thought, dismissing about a dozen possibilities. “Try [no names here, but you’ve probably heard of it]. It shouldn’t be that loud.’’
And, mercifully, it wasn’t – but, about 45 minutes after the salads had been eaten but the salad plates had not been cleared, and another 10 before someone noticed, and another 10 before the manager became involved, we started to wonder if maybe there was another problem besides sound here.
“I’m sorry,” the owner said, bringing our main courses to the table, after an hour and a half wait. “The kitchen got backed up. Let me buy you dessert to make up for it?’’
So maybe you can hear but can’t get fed at a restaurant here. (With the possible happy exception, if you are patient, of FREE DESSERT!) Or maybe you can get fed but can’t hear a word anyone else around the table is saying. Which possibly could lead to massive retirement mistakes.
“Did he just say we could retire at 65?”
“No, he said we should try the pad Thai.’’
There are things a restaurant can do to tamp down noise, of course – fewer hard surface floors and walls, for example – and we’ve written about them a bit over the years in design stories in the magazine. But those measures have to be built into the dining space before the first diners sit down.
So, back to the beginning, why doesn’t it seem to be a problem in France? Famous for food, fine dining … and, apparently, low potential risk for hearing loss and retirement mistakes?
I was wondering about that sometime between my paté en croute and tarte tatin, when I looked up from my faux-filet (definitely NOT a veggie burger) and noticed a thin gray wall of little textured pyramids behind the tables at the restaurant in France. Mystery solved, the restaurant’s walls were covered in sound-absorbing foam!
Genius.
We can always learn new things from our travels. Sometimes hear about them, too.
