| rev:text
| - 3 girlfriends and i went here one night a few months ago and i still tell people about my experience with "dining in the dark". we were all excited after reading about O.Noir and what would seem to be an interesting dining experience. It's a great concept - incorporating sense depravation into dining as an experiment to see if the other senses (taste, sound, etc) would be amplified. I also found it interesting that the servers were all legally blind and offered to explain their day-to-day situation with us.
The restaurant decor is horrible. The waiting room is dimly lit (for a good reason) and it looks like your grandmothers house. Furnished from what seems like 19th century furniture and a fake bookcase (come one, at least have reading material for the wait!). You pre-order your food and drinks and then wait for the servers to take you in.
You enter in a line with one hand on the shoulder of the person in front of you. it's PITCH black and you can't see a thing, but what you hear is incredibly loud dinner guests screaming, laughing and talking. I suppose everyone is seated relatively close to one another (more on this later) because you can hear everyones conversation and even chewing if you really pay attention. Once you're inside, you will have a hard time getting the attention of the waiter if you wish to use the restroom or get a sense of anxiety and want to step outside. You literally have to SCREAM your waiters name which adds to the already obnoxious atmosphere.
sure it's fun for the first 5 minutes. you're sitting in the dark, you don't know where your water is, whose leg is touching yours and how the hell you are going to eat. but this gets boring fast. you end up waiting a long time for your food & drink and it's less then fabulous. i had ordered the surprise me options for both my courses and drink (they would choose the meal for me and i'd have to guess what i was eating). the drink itself was pretty gross, some watered down mix of rum and orange creamsicle tasting liqueur. my appetizer came and it had turned out to be the calamari. it was squishy and overcooked, nothing special. this took me a very long to eat for i had to feel around on my plate with my fingers. it was rather disgusting, i felt like i was a toddler learning to eat. my main course was a badly done steak that was cut up into pieces and potatoes which tasted stale. definitely not impressed, i could have made a better meal at home. my dessert was chocolate cake that was so thick and sweet i couldn't finish it. it was a chocolate overdose, even my friend who is a self proclaimed chocolate addict decided it was an overload.
while we were "enjoying" our food, the people beside us had gotten drunk and spilled water on their table which magically happened to seep into ours (hence the close seating) and then proceeded to order martinis to get furthermore plastered. they really should monitor how much people drink in this place because it's a hazard. the one girl ended up knocking over her martini glass and it shattered on the floor. we didn't know where the broken glass was and the server didn't seem to care for no one bothered to clean it up or ask if we or the people next to us were okay.
when we left the darkness it was a shock to be exposed to the dim light. thank god they opted for that instead of tacky light because my eyes hurt for approximately 10 minutes afterwards. i ended up paying $50 for my food and drink (1) which was a HUGE waste of money for the quality of food i had eaten. i suppose i paid for the experience (ha ha). i don't even want to think of what the place looks like with the lights on, they probably have cheap plastic chairs from the 80s and old tables that fit with the rest of the decor.
as we left we were all disappointed, our excitement had long faded, as did our anxiety but hey at least we get to say we tried it. we also joked about blind dates at o.noir, wouldn't that be fun? i don't recommend it!
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)
![[cxml]](/fct/images/cxml_doc.png)
![[csv]](/fct/images/csv_doc.png)
![[text]](/fct/images/ntriples_doc.png)
![[turtle]](/fct/images/n3turtle_doc.png)
![[ld+json]](/fct/images/jsonld_doc.png)
![[rdf+json]](/fct/images/json_doc.png)
![[rdf+xml]](/fct/images/xml_doc.png)
![[atom+xml]](/fct/images/atom_doc.png)
![[html]](/fct/images/html_doc.png)