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| - Totally cool experience.
It is hard to set an expectation for a first Dine in the Dark experience, the only things I could imagine beforehand is how I would spill my drinks, have a hard time cutting my food and stumble over chairs. When the time came, what awaited us is an totally unique and amazingly cool experience.
The restaurant is located right off St. Laurent Station on St. Catherine, the store's lighted area is the waiting area, where the hostess handed us a menu of choices where we pick one entree (appetizer), one main course (entree) and one dessert) for the gastronomique menu. Each person's orders is taken down and our names were called when the waitresses and the waiters are ready to usher us into the pitch dark dining area of the restaurant. The instructions are to put your hand on the shoulder of the person in front (with the wait staff leading) and form a human train through the darkness. The wait staff are blind and able to navigate in the dark extremely well. Once we were ushered inside, a certain sense of panic poured in associated with going into a space completely devoid of light, rendering the sense I use the most completely useless. Within the few minutes of navigating to the hand washing area (yes, you will probably need to use your hand to eat at some point) and the table, the entire experience is about learning to listen and execute instructions carefully, feeling and anticipating turns through the hand-on-shoulder, and trusting completely. Once we arrived at our table, the waitress helped us feel our chairs, sat down and get acquainted with the location of utensils and napkins on the table. We were treated to our first drink, where it was placed right next to the wall divider on the left of the table - how clever, an absolute reference point for setting down the drinks. Our appetizers came shortly after, poking and picking up snails with a fork is something else in the dark, an action we are probably not even conscious of in the light, became a half guess-work, half dependent on transmission of feelings from tip of the fork. For a few times, where I 'thought' I picked up something, I was met with an empty fork. Oops. It was also quite cool to only realize what you are eating after it's already inside your mouth. The snails (with mushrooms) were quite good, not overly cheesy or exceptionally greasy. The main course was a little more challenging, not only did we need to pick up what's in our plate, we also need to cut it, pick up the proper piece, and sharing a taste with the other person became a creatively almost impossible task. After practically picking up my veal scallopini whole and taking bites out of it, the veggies and potatoes almost became too impossible. I start feeling my way around my beans and resorted to using my fingers. Boyfriend came up with a creative way of passing me a piece of his filet mignon by meeting my hand along the side of the table. Yay, success! We figured something out by ourselves. The meal was great but the experience we spent between each meal was more than awesome, we spent time analyzing the differences in what we are feeling eating in the dark and eating in light, which dishes would be most difficult to eat in the dark (we think it's Pho), imagining and making up stories, and creating and trying different ways to do various things without using our eyes, like feeling each other's facial features, looking for each other's hands and having so much laughs. At the end of the meal, we were pretty confident in having a cup of coffee in the dark and managing our table top to not spill anything.
The food was great though just having the experience was much more than worth it. Our waitress was attentive and helped guiding us through our entire meal, we loved her. The experience was definitely one of a kind and quite amazing, and I came out cleaner than a brand new napkin because of all the attention I paid to carefully navigating through my plate.
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