Dining Darkly and Blindly

To follow up with questions about painting blindly, I'm going to explore tomorrow evening dining blindly. Yes, I'm going to eat in the dark. I'm even going to pay big bucks to do so. Ridiculous? Possibly. But it's in the name of research and romance.

The gist is this: For the past few years, chefs and clever restauranteurs have been serving patrons in the dark. Either with blindfolds or in pitch black dining rooms, patrons from Los Angeles to Zurich to the Lower East Village have been treated to eating dishes with their eyes closed. No more dishing out thirty dollars for a skimpy leg of lamb and a parsley snippet shaped to look like a sailboat. No more paying pretty pennies for a Japanese chef to souffle your fish with exploding flames on your table--a visual feast that may compensate for a less than satisfactory gustatory experience. When you dine in the dark, your tongue not your eyes decide your meal's fateful rating.

Why? What's the purpose? Personally, I'm intrigued because restaurants that over-emphasize "presentation" and a meal's (if not the waiting staff's) visual appearance annoy me. I want to pay for exceptional food not for a waiter who looks as if he's modeling for a Calvin Klein ad on the side. The experience also intrigues me because I know my eyes too often dictate my experience of reality. With my eyes covered, my tongue and ears, my fingers and nose will have to guide me. As part of my research to track wonder, the experience affords me the immediate opportunity to explore how our senses invite wonder, how with eyes closed, we can live (and eat) in that state that hovers between wake and dream, between the outer world and the inner. Granted, this event will attract a lot of trendy people who will be decked out to be gawked at, but luckily I won't have to look at them either.

In the book Satisfaction: the Science of True Fulfillment, neuroscientist Gregory Berns explores the senses' role in a similar dining experience. He notes that "what you 'see' is as much the product of your imagination as it is the result of what your eyes physically take in" (87). That is, expectation and imagination directly influence the ways our eyes absorb and translate physical data--be it the slabs of penne vodka or the sushi rolls on our plate. He cites the work of another scientist, Peter Kaminsky, to state the obvious: "anticipation--the way you conjure up the food before it arrives--may actually affect how you taste a meal" (87). So, what happens to how you taste a meal when 1) you're blindfolded and 2) you're not given a menu and you don't order the meal--the waiter simply brings out the fixed meal? I'll find out tomorrow. I admit that since the event is billed as a "Pre-Halloween Bash," I cannot help but remember those eerie haunted house experiences in which, amidst an utterly dark room, I was asked to stick my hands behind a curtain and feel some mad scientist's "brain experiments" (composed, no doubt, of some cold pasta). Who knows what I'll be feeling and eating.

And romance? Well, Friday was Hillary's, my fiance's birthday. As part of her birthday experience, I'm taking her to the Galapagos Art Space tomorrow evening for a rich Dining in the Dark experience to be accompanied by some funky music; she has no idea what she's in for, so she'll be in even more wonder without expectation. Sort of gives a new twist to the idea of a blind date.