A Quiet Little Restaurant Rant, Picking Specifically on New York

 I'm picking on New York because as is so often the case it is leading a trend.  In this particular case, unfortunately, it's a very bad one.  Worse, it's already widespread.  Worse yet, it is being abetted by certain writers who carry a certain authority, and who ought to know better, but whose wanting to sound young and cool has muzzled their critical faculties.

For the moment I wish to leave aside the metastasis of "sensation" as the governing experience of the food in too many highly competitive New York restaurants.  It's a complicated business, but--since restaurants are businesses--it is admittedly almost irresistible in the face of all the morons taking pictures of their food and reviewing it while they eat it for Yelp or whatever...morons who really don't know anything about food and whose combined knowledge disproves the last vestiges of the notion of the wisdom of crowds.

But as I say, let's please pass over that for the moment to another and worse sort of ignorance, that of professional critics caught up in coolth.  I'm reluctant to pick on the New York Times, because I love and revere the New York Times but also because it can bite back.  Nevertheless some of what has been appearing there has stirred me past the point of prudence.  I'm going to take just a little-bitty example, namely, the recent review of another "theatrical" or "theme" restaurant--these are getting big lately--the kind that works very hard at seeming "authentic" in a ghoulish possible-only-in-New-York fusion of snobbery and Disney World, this one a "French" restaurant called Lafayette.  (How many of you remember the old Lafayette?  It was a French restaurant that didn't require quotation marks around its ethnicity.)

And from that review only an eensy-tinesy detail, from down in what they call the "service information."  One of the items listed there is "sound level," and a good idea that is, too.  But in this review the sound level is described as "authentically loud."

Ooch.  This, I infer, means that the writer thinks that "real" French bistros (i.e., in France) are loud.  Well, they're not.  French people don't bellow.  Sometimes Parisian bistros get loud--when there are a lot of American tourists there.  Otherwise, the word for a French bistro full of people talking would be "lively."  Nobody hollering, no danger of hearing damage.

An aside: I've finally gotten something figured out, in at least a physiognomic way: Americans have started opening their mouths really wide, especially the women, especially when they laugh.  When you open your mouth really wide, you make a lot of noise, ipso facto.  (You also often show a mouthful of half-chewed food.)  Then look at a bunch of French people at table.  They really don't know how to open their mouths wide (exception for opera singers).  Anyway: French bistros in France are full of conversation, because, absolutely, French people, especially Parisians, love to talk, usually all at once, and at a lively level.  But it's like one of those limiters we used to use in the recording studio when I was in the record business (when LPs could take only so much)--the volume hits a certain level and that's it.  They don't bellow, they don't holler, they don't scream, they don't do that shrieking laugh that women in San Francisco and New York have so horribly made their own.  (And what's so not funny about it is that when you find out what they're laughing about, it's invariably not funny at all.  They'll admit it themselves.)  Thus the young and/or never-been-to-France or never-noticed-if-they-did reader of the Times review has his or her open-mouthed bellowing certified as "authentically" French-bistro-loud.

Okay, I know, I know, next thing is an aluminum cane with four rubber tips.

GODDAM NOISY RESTAURANTS

If Craig Claiborne were alive today,  and he walked into The Slanted Door in San Francisco, I believe he would turn around and walk back out without tasting the food.  He would find the noise unbearable.  I spent more than two years researching a book called The Man Who Changed the Way We Eat: Craig Claiborne and the American Food Renaissance (just out, by the way), so I’m pretty confident in saying that.  Craig was the first food editor of the New York Times, having started in 1957, and he is the father of the food world we now inhabit.  Some of his legacy would appall him.  Civilized conversation was something he prized.

Yet The Slanted Door is very popular—it is the highest-grossing restaurant in San Francisco, so clearly a lot of people can tolerate the racket and do like the food.  I don’t, but I wouldn’t eat there again anyway, so that doesn’t matter.

New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles—every major American city is chockablock with painfully noisy but nonetheless popular restaurants, each full of bellowing men and screeching women.  To my ear the women are worse, owing to two factors: the relatively recent ascent of baby-talk voices so piercing they almost could cut glass; and the increasing tendency of some women to imitate men in laughing with their mouths wide open.  Woo hoo! is their aural signature.

The San Francisco Chronicle’s restaurant reviews do their readers a particular favor by bestowing not just the usual star ratings for food but also noise ratings that rise from one bell for “pleasantly quiet” to four bells, “can talk only in raised voices,” and finally to a little icon of a bomb, indicating “too noisy.”  It’s not unusual for the Chron to give a place three stars and also a bomb.  Why so many people willingly go to a restaurant in the full knowledge that they will have to shout to be heard throughout the meal, and and still may not be heard, would be a mystery to Craig Claiborne.

Why are things like this?  I can think of several causal factors.

    —Managers and servers know that turning up the music makes a crowd louder, and they conflate the resultant shouting with “having a good time.”  The New York restaurateur Tony May was quoted thus in the Wall Street Journal: “I don't think of it as noise.  It's excitement.  The new consumer is looking for energy, a good vibe.”  In France and Italy, meanwhile, people laugh and have a great time in restaurants without yelling.

    —Owners tend not to mention this, but the din makes people drink more, eat faster, and leave sooner.

    —Many restaurants are physically designed to be noisy, with hard surfaces and no sound-deadening materials.  Of The Slanted Door the Chronicle’s Michael Bauer wrote, “When the metal legs of the formed wooden chairs drag across the floor as patrons scoot in or away from the table, it's the 21st century version of nails scraping across a blackboard.  All through the night, the already explosive noise level is pierced by the screech of metal against stone.”

    —A small number of very noisy people raise the noise level throughout a restaurant.

    —The belief is widespread that we must show happiness and that raucous laughter is an index of happiness.

    —Ear-splitting noise increases the secretion of the “fight-or-flight” neurotransmitter epinephrine, and the edgy sensation that that induces can be perceived as an exciting “buzz.”

    —Many American children are no longer instructed in civil behavior.  When they grow up, they do not know the difference between public and private space.

    —People with empty lives crave overstimulation—hence not only noise but obesity.  People with empty lives have nothing to say anyhow.

    —There are fewer and fewer alternatives.  In the San Francisco Chronicle’s “Top 100 Bay Area Restaurants,” ratings of one or two bells are scarce.

No doubt you can supply more reasons.   In Craig’s last years—he died in 2000—he published a slim little book titled Elements of Etiquette: A Guide to Table Manners in an Imperfect World, and in it he decried the increasingly boorish behavior he saw around him in restaurants.  If he were still among us, I am certain that he would be raising hell about it, in print and often, and he would undoubtedly get results.

The big question for the rest of us, now, without Craig to speak on our behalf, is, What can we do about it?   One thing I’m sure of is that if enough of us complain, things will change.  So complain.  Assertively.  Just not too loudly, please.