Travel Blog

Yesterday I wrote about my dining experience Monday night at the wonderful restaurant Cacao, which it was - up to a point.

That point came around 9 pm, just when the tables started to fill. Soft graceful Latin songs were replaced by techno music. It was not deafening, so we could still hold a conversation, but the repetitive pounding took its toll. One of the men at our table, who lives in Alaska, said it was starting to give him a headache.

The problem is not new. In his book Those United States, published in 1912, the English novelist Arnold Bennett wrote of dining on his ocean liner to the strains of an orchestra. "That ragtime, committed, I suppose, originally by some well-intentioned if banal composer in the privacy of his study one night, had spread over the whole universe of restaurants like a pest, to the exasperation of the sensitive but evidently to the joy of correct diners. ...And yet you never encountered a person who, questioned singly, did not agree and even assert of his own accord that music at meals is an outrageous nuisance!"

I think today few Americans would complain about soft music in restaurants, but the vast majority would veto techno. I suspect that it is played in an effort to get people to eat quickly and to increase turnaround. Noise in the service of the almighty dollar.