New Orleans Food Questions And Comments

Noisy Restaurants

Garland Robinette asked me this in the hall at the radio station one day:

I was in a restaurant last night--I won't tell you which one--and the thought crossed my mind that it seems to me that restaurants are deliberately being built to have a high level of noise. I think they may be doing this to keep you from staying there any longer than it takes to eat. Is that just me?

Tom sez:

There's no question about it. Restaurant designers who built dining rooms to be very noisy would have been considered inept a couple of decades ago, when restaurants advertised their quiet, romantic atmosphere as a reason to dine in their establishments. But the trend took on a life of its own when the guys who look upon running a restaurant as a science instead of an art made a discovery: If a restaurant is loud, it attracts younger diners who will not block up a table as long as people who are visiting with one another would.

Both of those effects are highly desirable to any restaurateur who looks at his bottom line frequently. (As more of them do.) And they get complaints from people, sure enough. . . but those people just keep on coming, if the rest of the ensemble is attractive. How else to explain Galatoire's, for example, where one has to yell to be heard for over a century? And Galatoire's has a large population of the people who are least amenable to noisy spots: customers over fifty.

There's another mechanism that encourages the evolution of loud restaurants. It's that many people feel uncomfortable in a quiet place. It forces them to make conversation with their partners, and yet do so in a way that cannot be heard by everyone. Such people are among those with the greatest disdain for restaurants with lively acoustics, paradoxically.

The forces at work to make noisy restaurants are strong. Quiet restaurants are becoming rare. The mainstream wins again.

Subscribe To The Five-Star Edition
Every weekday, I write even more articles, reviews, and recipes for the New Orleans Menu Daily. I send it to subscribers by e-mail, and make it available on a private site on the website. They also get access to all past articles, indexed for easy use. No advertising!

Upgrade to the Five-Star Edition! You truly cannot argue with the price: whatever number of dollars you think it's worth. (If you give too much, I'll extend the subscription.) If you change your mind later, I'll give you a refund.

Click here for more information and a sample.


	Click here for an index to all questions, answers, and reports on New Orleans cooking, recipes, and restaurants. Click here to ask a question or give a report.