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How Restaurants Got So Loud (theatlantic.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Other sounds that reach 70 decibels include freeway noise, an alarm clock, and a sewing machine. But it's still quiet for a restaurant. Others I visited in Baltimore and New York City while researching this story were even louder: 80 decibels in a dimly lit wine bar at dinnertime; 86 decibels at a high-end food court during brunch; 90 decibels at a brewpub in a rehabbed fire station during Friday happy hour. Restaurants are so loud because architects don't design them to be quiet. Much of this shift in design boils down to changing conceptions of what makes a space seem upscale or luxurious, as well as evolving trends in food service. Right now, high-end surfaces connote luxury, such as the slate and wood of restaurants including The Osprey in Brooklyn or Atomix in Manhattan.
This trend is not limited to New York. According to Architectural Digest, mid-century modern and minimalism are both here to stay. That means sparse, modern decor; high, exposed ceilings; and almost no soft goods, such as curtains, upholstery, or carpets. These design features are a feast for the eyes, but a nightmare for the ears. No soft goods and tall ceilings mean nothing is absorbing sound energy, and a room full of hard surfaces serves as a big sonic mirror, reflecting sound around the room. The result is a loud space that renders speech unintelligible. Now that it's so commonplace, the din of a loud restaurant is unavoidable. That's bad for your health -- and worse for the staff who works there. But it also degrades the thing that eating out is meant to culture: a shared social experience that rejuvenates, rather than harms, its participants.
This trend is not limited to New York. According to Architectural Digest, mid-century modern and minimalism are both here to stay. That means sparse, modern decor; high, exposed ceilings; and almost no soft goods, such as curtains, upholstery, or carpets. These design features are a feast for the eyes, but a nightmare for the ears. No soft goods and tall ceilings mean nothing is absorbing sound energy, and a room full of hard surfaces serves as a big sonic mirror, reflecting sound around the room. The result is a loud space that renders speech unintelligible. Now that it's so commonplace, the din of a loud restaurant is unavoidable. That's bad for your health -- and worse for the staff who works there. But it also degrades the thing that eating out is meant to culture: a shared social experience that rejuvenates, rather than harms, its participants.
are now ordering their food delivered. I find going to most restaurants about as pleasant as going to a shopping mall. Ugh!
Coffee shops are usually pretty quiet, if only because they are smaller and fewer people fit into them.
People want to have what they say heard. As the background noise goes up, they talk louder. That brings the background noise level up for others, so they talk louder,
For years, our company held an employee Christmas party at a steak house. The last two years, though, we employees said forget it... the noise level was too high to socialize, even though we all loved the food.
Sound absorbing treatments are usually, at the very least, flame retardant, as they are designed for use in commercial applications and have to follow fire codes for building materials. You can clean them with an upholstery attachment on a vacuum cleaner.
Our favorite breakfast place has pictures hanging on the walls and sound absorbing panels on the ceiling to control noise. It's also broken up into multiple rooms with upholstered chairs and booths. Even when it's packed, which it often is, you can have a conversation with everyone at your table without raising your voice.
The new hipster brunch place that opened up on the other side of town is a giant concrete, wood, glass and steel box. when someone sneezes on the other size of the restaurant it reverberates through the space like a thunderclap.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
I avoid loud restaurants; I'm sure I'm not the only one. They may look nice, and maybe their looks attract more people than their loudness scares off; but, I do take note if a place is too loud and I don't return- so there is a downside to being loud, they do lose some customers... unless I'm just a unique freak.
Not unique at all. I'm functionally rather deaf, with loud tinnitus and a lot of holes in my hearing. One of the features of this kind of deafness is that if I'm sitting in a fairly quiet room, I can hear and understand most conversation. But in a loud place, I can't hear anything but noise. A weird thing - people with my kind of deafness process all sounds the same, whereas people with normal hearing have brains that can select what should be listened to.
Does this cost business? I think so. Who would want to go to say, Olive Garden for a business lunch or dinner? Especially when a fair number of the folks in leadership positions have hearing issues like mine. In our locale, we've found a nice cafe that manages to not sound like a foundry , and provide them with a lot of business.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
If I go to a sports bar, I expect certain levels of noise from the patrons and screens (although most of the screens have closed captioning turned on)
If I go out for dinner, I'd like to be able to hold a conversation with the people at my table, and not hear people 10 tables away. Older, more expensive places usually are much quieter.
One of the places I used to like was quiet to medium loud, but they completely overhauled and expanded the place.
Next time I went in, you couldn't hear the person talking next to you. The new decor included a huge glass cupola which acted like a sound magnifier. It was so loud, I was wondering if there were some sound canceling technology that they could install.
No it's not. It's a result of most interior designers not having a clue about acoustics.
At work, our offices were redone by a high-priced interior design firm. Most of our conference rooms were done in all hard surfaces, granite tables, wood floors, high ceilings, the works. They were also so acoustically noisy that people would have to yell in order for the person across the table from you to understand what they were saying. Some rooms were so bad that it was physically painful for me to be in the room due to the sound reflections. The high ambient noise also wreaked havoc with our conference phones. Callers would frequently complain that they coudn't understand anything we said. The rooms looked great, but utterly failed in their purpose of facilitating communications.
After a year of pushing, I finally got them to allow me to have a local acoustical tile manufacturer install sound dampening tiles in one conference room. The boss was so impressed with the results that he got the remaining 6 rooms done within the next two months.
Which people often forget was a major source of gossip in the restaurants of old.
This is really correlation not causation though. The major reasons for the changes mentioned are simple:
ADA
Fire Safety
Sanitation/Inspections.
ADA requires larger spaces to accomodate wheelchairs. Gone are the old timey tight spaces where once a heavyset American would have a hard time squeezing by.
Fire Safety has lead to all possible flammable objects being removed or reduced.
Sanitation has lead to stainless-only tableware, a hard plastic easy-wipe surface, and no tablecloth except in extremely upscale restaurants (and in most of the quality ones those have to be changed after any spills or ideally after the customers leave before the next customers are seated, leading to a few minutes worth of bussing and resetting per table, instead of a simple wipedown and new place settings (which most waiters I have seen can have done in around 30 seconds.
While we were there, I was in full view of a family where the teenage son spent the entire meal on his phone reading posts under the table - Snap, Insta, FB, whatever, I couldn't tell and don't care. I was frankly shocked. I get that you have to pick your battles as a parent, but damn, Thanksgiving dinner is a hill worth dying on. Neither parent had a phone out, so far as I could see, so they certainly had grounds to quarrel with him.
I have a friend who has a teenage daughter with severe Asperger's. They were in town a few years ago for Comic-Con and I took them out to dinner. Her daughter spent most of her time on her smartphone as it was the only way she could handle being in a public social setting like that. (She did better at Comic-Con because she was dressed up in costume and, I believe, "not herself".) She and I did talk a little, whenever she was ready, and we all had a pretty good time. When I dropped them off at their hotel, her daughter hugged me goodbye, which surprised her mom, who said she had never seen her do that w/o being prompted.
Maybe things were different with the kid you saw, but keep an open mind going forward ...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Indian restaurants never seem to be very busy in the US- Americans have a weird phobia about Indian food
Avoiding a restaurant where all the food tastes like various forms of swamp mud is a not a phobia.
I am a very food-curious person. I like to taste food from every culture I encounter. . . but, Indian hasn't made my list of "try this again".
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Several years ago, probably over a decade ago, slashdot published an article (that I failed to find) on restaurant noise. Yes, people were complaining about noisy restaurants back then.
To summarize, a restaurant with dining on two floors set up one with hard surfaces, bare brick walls an an exposed ceiling. It was loud! The other was traditional high-end room with wood tables, drapes an other soft sound absorbent surfaces. It was very quiet. Both were serving the same "New American" menu from the same kitchen.
After 6 months the "quiet" floor was closed and refitted to match the noisy floor because the loud floor was booked solid while the quiet floor always had available tables. The hypothesis was that noisy restaurants were perceived as "exciting" while quiet ones were "boring".
The bottom line was that, no matter how much people complain about noise, they prefer that to quiet dining. Loud dining rooms are often very much by design, not acoustic incompetence.
Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer, Retired