Dark restaurant
Dark restaurants are restaurants in which guests dine in complete darkness . They belong to the area of experience gastronomy . Some operators aim to bring their sighted guests closer to the "spectrum of perception of blind people and thus their situation in society"; others see themselves as an interactive stage and would like to enable the guests to experience perception and communication very intensively through all the other senses. The first restaurant was opened in Zurich in 1999; since then numerous others have emerged.
concept
Before entering, participants are asked to stow away or switch off possible light sources such as clocks with luminous numbers and mobile phones. The dark dining room can be reached through a lock, other guests are then not disturbed by incident light. You are either guided to the tables and served by visually impaired employees or by those who can see with night vision devices .
The sense of touch and hearing are particularly important in dark restaurants. Through the sense of taste and smell , the guest will try to identify the food. The unfamiliar atmosphere is mostly perceived as entertaining. It is also sometimes found that eating and conversations are experienced more consciously in the dark.
The offers of the dark restaurants are very different, some of them only offer two main courses to choose from, usually a meat dish and a vegetarian meal. Each guest is served a precisely specified number of courses, which conveys the character of an event rather than that of a restaurant. In others, you can choose from many flavors and each guest determines the number of courses to be served. After eating, you can find out about the exact menu sequence and the preparation of the dishes.
The concept of dark restaurants certainly only gives a very limited impression of the actual experience of blind and visually impaired people. An essential difference is z. B. in the fact that sighted guests in dark restaurants feel and usually are unobserved. In contrast, the behavior of blind people can be constantly observed by their surroundings. Neither the sighted guests nor the sighted waitresses are made aware of the real needs of blind and visually impaired restaurant visitors - for example when ordering, serving or paying.
Origin of the idea
Axel Rudolph from Cologne originally built acoustic partition walls in noisy rooms. In his doctoral thesis he dealt with the influence of everyday noises on customer behavior. At the invitation of the Foundation for the Blind Institution in Frankfurt am Main , he designed a cultural program for blind people and their sighted relatives. They wanted and should experience culture together under the same conditions. From Axel Rudolph's conception of a darkened, scenic and "decorated" meeting room with a sound backdrop, the series of events "Dialogue in the Dark" developed in 1988/1989 from his collaboration with Andreas Heinecke, in which, from the beginning, the joint visit and experience of a gastronomic establishment in the dark (café, bar, restaurant) was an integral part of the concept. Consuming drinks and food together should result in a relaxed lingering and an attentive conversation among the guests.
History of the dark restaurants
Inspired by the exhibition "Dialogue in the Dark" (February - April 1998 in the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich), a project by the blind pastor Jürg Spielmann and the visually impaired psychologist Stefan Zappa was created for the Swiss national exhibition Expo.02. With “blindekuh” in September 1999, the first dark restaurant finally started its permanent operation in Zurich.
In 2001 the first German pub was set up in Cologne, which now also has restaurants in Berlin and Hamburg, followed by the first Austrian dark restaurant in Innsbruck in 2002.
There are now numerous dark restaurants in the most varied of concepts around the world. In 2011 the term “dark restaurant” was included in the Duden .
