![]() Two editors agreed it was “the worst dining experience” of their lives: “The food is more of a distraction from your fear,” one said, “not something to nourish you.” (At the end of the restaurant’s 14-month lifespan in 2013, the headline read, “NY’s #1 Nightmare Factory Now Officially Closed.”) But the experience - like so many disability simulations - can also exacerbate the stigma of blindness, and a diner’s takeaway is often a version of, “Thank God I don’t have to eat like that ever again.” Eater NY made a running gag of its loathing of Dans le Noir. The writer Adam Linn told me that working as a server a few nights a week at Dans le Noir, a short-lived entry in the dining in the dark genre in New York, helped him through some difficult years as a single father, and that a fellow blind server used her wages to save for a down payment on a condo in the Bronx. ![]() Journalists describe heightened senses, even a feeling of liberation: “You are only a voice in the darkness like any other,” a reporter for the BBC wrote, “finally free of your body.”īlindekuh was founded by a blind pastor to generate empathy for blind people, and dining in the dark restaurants have provided reliable jobs for the chronically underemployed blind workforce. People’s experiences of these restaurants range from delight to terror. ![]() The blind waitstaff helps the diners find their seats, and then serves them a series of mystery dishes, which the guests taste and guess at in total darkness. At each of these restaurants (as well as at ubiquitous one-off dining in the dark fundraising events), diners follow a similar procedure: They’re asked to stash their phones and other light-emitting items into lockers, and then walk, conga line-style, into a pitch-black room, guided by a staff of blind and low-vision servers. Blindekuh, or the Blind Cow (the German name for the game of blind man’s bluff), was wildly popular, and inspired dozens of similar ventures that opened in cities across Europe and around the world. ![]() In 1999, the first “dining in the dark” restaurant opened in Zurich, Switzerland. ![]()
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