Dining dans le noir

On Friday night I went to one of the craziest dinners pretty much...ever.

Dans Le Noir is a restaurant where you eat a delicious 3 course meal completely and totally in the dark.

Yup. That happened. It was insane.

Eating without any light whatsoever makes you experience food in a completely different way - you don't fully know what you're eating because all you have is the guidance of the generic menu that you chose beforehand (meat, fish, vegetarian, or a surprise), so you use your hands and your tastebuds to try and figure it out (it isn't finger food and you have silverware available to you, but since you can't see anything you definitely need to use your hands at least somewhat).

I don't know if there's anyone who really enjoys being blindfolded or otherwise unable to see, but I definitely don't, so this was an interesting restaurant choice for me. When I was first seated at the table, I became completely disoriented by the fact that my eyes were open yet I could not see A DAMN THING. Usually your eyes adjust to the dark, but since there's no light in this restaurant at all, that never happens. My body went into full-on panic mode, and I felt eerily similar to the way I felt right before the only time I've ever fainted (which happened a few years ago). I was light-headed and dizzy and a little nauseous (which, FYI for anyone who might want to go to this restaurant, I'm pretty sure is not normal because no one else seemed to be anything other than a little freaked out by the darkness).

Thankfully, though, I realized that if I closed my eyes I calmed down immediately, since, you know, I'm used to not being able to see when my eyes are closed. And after a minute or two I was able to even keep my eyes open and enjoy the meal.

The experience ended up being completely awesome, and when they showed us the full menus after the meal I was surprised by how much I had guessed correctly. My dining buddy and I were also pretty impressed with ourselves for managing a system where we swapped the "surprise cocktails" that we had ordered so that we could try each others' drinks.

Another thing about the dark? It completely breaks down social boundaries. We sat at a table of 10, and even though we were 5 pairs of people that didn't know each other beforehand, conversations blended between pairs and groups because without visual cues, you often couldn't tell if the person next to you was addressing their friend, you, or everyone. At one point I definitely yelled across the table at someone a few people away from me because I overheard him talking about his food and it was clear he was eating from the same menu as I was (the meat menu, FYI) and I wanted to compare notes.

Good times. When I emerged from the room I was extremely grateful to have my vision back (unlike the waiters, who are actually blind).

 

And of course, here all the Stratejoy posts that you may have missed and that I forgot to link to:

- The time my attempt to not drink for a month went up in flames

- The big deal about beauty

- Sometimes you need to remind yourself to just keep swimming

- On the desire to push my own boundaries by letting go

- Defining my own version of freedom

- The time I did a crazy Bikram yoga class in the middle of Times Square

- Another one about what I learned from not drinking