Some good friends gave Maru and I a wedding gift that was a “dining in the dark” experience at Dans Le Noir?. We went last night and loved it.
Much like it says on the tin, you dine in complete, pitch-black darkness, and for two hours you go on a five course culinary journey.
It starts with your visually impaired waiter guiding you to your table. As you moved through the room, you hear all the normal sounds of a restaurant—people chatting, cutlery clinking, and waiters moving about.
As each course is brought out, you navigate the plate with your cutlery, your nose, and sometimes your fingers. You guess what each dish and drink pairing is, and are extra careful to put everything in a place where you won’t knock it off the table.
The experience is an amazing empathy building exercise. The Dans Le Noir? website says it best, “When the blind person guides the sighted person, this inversion is an astonishing exercise of empathy that forces us to make an unusual transfer of trust. It is an amazing approach to raising positive awareness of blindness and disability.”