Sunday, 14 January 2007
Eating in the dark
I have talked once before about Lille's India-themed Lille 3000 thing that they've had going on. Well besides covering the city with Indian decorations, another thing they had was the Resto dans le noir, based on an idea that already exists in Paris and London: a restaurant in total darkness.
Besides being something new, the point of this was to discover Indian food (which is unknown in France), to rediscover food in general (since not seeing what you are eating forces you to focus much more on taste and smell), and to gain an appreciation for the blind—for in this restaurant, the waiters are all blind (which is actually quite reassuring, since they are totally at home).
So we arrived (along with Aurélie and Emilie's godson Michaël) and were taken to one room, where they explained how the evening would go and took down our orders—except they weren't really orders, since the three-course meal is all a surprise—they only took down if we had any dietary requirements or allergies. Then we went to the coat room where they took coats and purses (which people might trip on), and also cell phones, cameras, and watches—anything that might give off light. After that we were lined up by table, everyone putting his hands on the shoulder of the person in front of him, and led through a serious of heavy black curtains as we moved progressively into total darkness. So by the time we were seated, we were really and truly in complete darkness; it was quite a strange experience.
Of course, it took less than five minutes for Emilie to spill her bottle of coke on me :-) Luckily I was able to avoid getting it on me, and from then on things went fairly smoothly. We did hear one other big spill at another table later on, but that was it. Afterwards we were led out the way we came in (so we never actually saw the room where we'd eaten), and shown the menu of what we'd had. It was a fun experience and much more of a challenge than I had thought it would be.
