Loud Restaurants, What Happened to Ambience.

We don’t eat out a lot, but one trend I have noticed over the years is how noisy restaurants have become. When you have trouble hearing the person across the table from you the restaurant is to loud.

Imagine a restaurant’s empty floorplan.

Now then, realize that every square foot of the dining room area generates revenue. For many restaurants, that means getting as many guest seating opportunities into that square footage as they can possibly manage.

And that means more people, sitting in close proximity to one another, than used to ever be the case in restaurants. And to cover that traffic of humans sitting near one another, along with the bustle of servers, bussers, food runners, etc. you raise the ambient music levels to compensate. And thus, it gets loud.

If its bothersome, seek out restaurants (typically older spaces) that are stuck with bolted-in booths and banquettes that typically create more space between tables and thus result in less noise.

Figures you would show up with an entirely sensible and logical rationale for it Trig. I mean you were running places when much of that transition occurred, so I’m sure you had more than a few of those conversations.

And the TV’s playing in the open bar areas.

At the restaurant here in NoVA, we had a couple of banquet-type areas that were really designed for a single large table and a single party. (One room was basically a square, the other a rectangle with like a boardroom style long table in it.) For Valentines and New Years Eve (two holidays when you’re not really expecting to book any banquets of 12+) we’d haul those tables out and replace them with rental tables and chairs to utilize the floor space. And it got crowded in those areas, and they had a completely different atmosphere from the booths in the rest of the dining room area.

But man did doing that help the bottom line on those nights. And so it was easy to see why restaurants do that. Over the course of months/quarters/years, all of that adds up.

If you go to restaurants with bad food, they are very quiet inside. :)

White tablecloth dining is boring. Those are the places you take your parents. People want to eat somewhere with energy these days.

I think it is the food that brings people back, not how loud a place is. But Triggercut is right (of course he should know) when he says that packing more tables in leads to noisier dining.

Having been to restaurants in Germany, Italy, Croatia, Denmark and Finland, I can not say that I encountered a loud restaurant more than once.

The trick is of course the number of tables, as others said, but also that many restaurants actually have these separating “wall” (which are usually nicely decorated) between the tables, which serve as a natural blocker.
And finally, generally in the restaurants I’ve been to, people try to be more silent to not ruin it for the others. Maybe that consideration is a European thing, though.

I know this “loudness” phenomenon more from bars & clubs, where the music is so loud you cannot talk to each other and have to shout. And because everyone is shouting, things get even worse.
Primary reason I don’t go to bars/clubs any more or only extremely rarely.

The ciccio group of restaurants are terrible for this. They all feature some kind of industrial look with concrete floors, metal ceilings where you can see all the duct work, etc… They are also very compact, packing people in. While the food is good, the atmosphere is horrible and its super loud. I refuse to go to any of their restaurants anymore. As well as eating food, I want a nice atmosphere where I can relax in while I am eating.

This is a really big part of it as well. Not all the blame can be put at the foot of, “more people, more profits.” We have a few places near us that cater their bar area to some TV’s for sports. It’s just about any bar these days. Cheap LCD screens literally line the bar area. Usually besides the normal din of patrons, a chosen event will be playing over their speaker system in the bar as well.

I’ll contrast two of those places.

In one, they have an industrial style setup: high ceilings, with open view of pipes/vents/etc, brushed concrete flooring and bar, large garage doors on the outside walls that get raised up in warm weather, metal signs from various things hanging on the walls, and metal furniture. Even when it’s only 1/4 full in there, it is OBNOXIOUSLY loud. You can barely hear someone next to you without them talking in your ear, you usually have to nearly yell at a bartender if they are over about 5 feet away, and once the crowd settles in, you honestly can’t even hear the TVs. I’ve been in there when it’s just a lone bartender and 3 patrons, and even the lone game playing on the TV at low volume truly echos throughout the bar. Nothing there is quiet.

In the other, they separated the bar off the attached restaurant into a smaller space. It’s an older interior, but it’s still quite classy in comparison to the newer one above: low ceiling, tasteful carpet, upholstered bar seats table chairs and booths, normal height windows with drapes, some wood paneling behind the bar and a wood bar as well. And this place gets just as busy and just as crowded. You can always hear someone next to you and usually most of your table, and you can communicate with the bartender nearly the length of the bar with not too much of a raised voice.

These two places are obviously extremes, but the design of a place has a whole lot to do with noise.

I’ve always wondered whether everyone is as oblivious to what is being said to one another, or am I particularily bad at making out words when shouted at in a crowded bar. As a result I’ve always found it peculiar that bars were considered a good place to meet women by my friends, when conversation goes like this:

“whaaaatsss yeeer nammmmmmmeeeee”
"whatttttt?
“your naaaaaaaaameee”
“hgggmmmmmmmdddd”
“… … cooooooool.”

(In retrospect the guys who found it an easy place to meet women were just good looking, and didn’t need to talk much, mystery solved.)

Anyway, I agree, I have an extreme dislike of dining in a boisterous din, it overwhelms my senses, and isn’t suited to helping me enjoy my food. I have a growing case of tinnitus as I get older (brought upon, I am positive, by blaring speakers in bars from over the years), and when I go out for food these days, the buzzing I feel afterwards in my ears tells me these are not healthy spaces to eat.

My coworkers now think I’m a recluse, not going out at lunch, but it’s infinitely more pleasant to bring my pack lunch and read in the cafeteria than submit to the chaos of lunchtime in London streets; and besides, it’s easier on the wallet, and alleviates all the restaurant-choosing pre-food waffling.

While I agree packin’ em in would make a restaurant louder, I have been in restaurants that aren’t super packed in, and still had loud experiences.

The article goes into pretty good detail about how the current trend in minimalism and industrial design hasn’t been counter-balanced by someone thinking of the sound design of the spaces. There are architects and acoustical engineers that rant about this kind of thing all of the time. We are basically building echo chambers. People have stopped using materials and designs that help absorb sound.

I think about all of the trendier new restaurants, they have tile walls, high ceilings, metal tables with no table-cloths, open kitchens, exposed HVAC ductwork, and attached bar areas with no walls.

I think that the whole field of acoustics in architecture is fascinating, because it is something that is often overlooked,

The article linked is a really good read.

The author of the blog McMansion Hell has posted a lot about sound and acoustics in designs (guess what a lot of mcmansions are badly designed for noise.

I was with you most of the way there, spiffy, but I love going out for lunch in London. So many food markets and pop-ups in walking distance! My coworkers still think I’m a recluse (they’re right, to be fair), because I just go by myself and fetch something to bring back to my desk.

Ah well, I meant not going out as a group at lunch. I’d be completely fine with grabbing takeaway from brick and mortar or food stalls every day, other than the imperative to pay off the mortgage as soon as humanly possible (who am I kidding, it makes me feel better about buying comics and toys…)

Reading that first article made me realize I always shut off music in games. You already have sound effects, why do you need more stuff on top of that.

In a restaurant, you have music because:

  1. Other people are talking and don’t want to be eavesdropped on
  2. The restaurant doesn’t want the loudest sound in the place to be bussers clearing tables, dirty plates being dropped and breaking, etc.
  3. The restaurant ESPECIALLY doesn’t want you to hear servers who are in the weeds having panic attacks, serviers saying mean things about the table that just ordered four hot teas and put them in the weeds, servers berating one another because someone let all the coffee airpots go to empty without starting fresh pots, etc.

It seems like this is like tuning cars’ suspensions. A very smooth ride used to be considered luxurious; then people associated with old-peoples cars, so young people wanted a tight suspension where you could feel all the bumps in the road. Lots of restaurants cultivate loudness because they want to be seen as places young people hang out and party.

In other words, they want to make money. Stuffy white tablecloth restaurants don’t do very well, except at the ultra high-end. They aren’t fun. I’d had more than my share of three michelin star tasting menus and I can say that with authority. Who wants to sit down in a quiet room for 4 hours eating tiny plates? Where the waiter explains every ingredient, and the sommelier talks about the varietals and the winemakers’ family and their ethos? All that stuff is boring as hell.

Mario Batali may be a borderline rapist, but he introduced the concept of selling extremely high quality expensive food in a relatively raucous atmosphere, and that’s a great thing. It’s fun to eat at Babbo. And a bit easier to get reservations now, actually.

Multiple studies have shown that people eat and drink more in a loud environment.

Both laboratory-based research [2] and field studies [3, 4] converge on the conclusion that people drink more when exposed to loud musica. So, for example, the participants in one laboratory study reported by McCarron and Tierney drank more of a soft drink, at a faster rate, when loud popular music was playing at 88 dB than when it was played at a more reasonable 72 dB instead [2]. Meanwhile, Guéguen et al. [4] conducted a more ecologically valid study in a couple of bars … in France. The volume of the popular music that was normally played in the bars was varied. The 120 customers whose behaviour was observed ordered significantly more to drink when the music was played at 88–91 dB than when it was played at its normal level of 72–75 dB… At this point, it is worth noting that we are not the only ones who show such noise-induced behaviours. Even lab rats eat and drink more as the background noise level goes up.

These results have been known to the restaurant industry for a while, and are nowadays incorporated into restaurant design.