Cut the noise, put ambience back on the menu

Otago Daily Times

13-05-2025

Bare concrete walls, open kitchens and tinny speakers mean it is harder than ever to hear your fellow diners. Dann Wallace meets the people fighting for quiet.
When I ask a New Yorker called Greg Scott to recommend a quiet spot in town, two words spring instantly to his mind.
"Burp Castle."
It's in the East Village, wood-panelled, with burgers and banana-bread beer, murals, staff in monk robes and a stereo that if it plays at all plays very quiet Gregorian chants.
Scott likes it because "if you're too loud, the bar staff soon quieten you down".
There's a ban on "loud talking".
Signs on the wall encourage you only to whisper.
Others just read "Ssssh!"
One five-star review on Yelp says, "The silence is all consuming."
"The staff look mad if you get loud," says Scott.
"They put their fingers on their lips. They might shush you."
And if they shush you, everyone else in Burp Castle shushes you too.
This is not a middle-aged rant. Anyone who is older than they were yesterday knows that restaurants seem louder these days, just as light seems lower, chairs seem harder, fonts seem tinier.
Actually, perhaps this is a middle-aged rant.
According to a survey by SoundPrint (an app that measures decibel levels), Europe's loudest restaurants are in London. At the top? A place in the centre of town with a regular ambience of 97dB. For context, the Royal National Institute for Deaf People says anything above 90db is like sitting next to a running motorbike, plus you're indoors and hungry. Prolonged exposure to even 85dB can lead to hearing damage.
And yes, I'm that guy in his 40s suddenly surprised he can't follow conversation around a table in some packed high-ceilinged industrial joint, as his companions laugh delightedly over who knows what. You're supposed to engage in communal storytelling, but there are only so many times you can go "Say again?" before you just pretend and go "Haha yeah!"
That's why I'd like to go to Burp Castle.
Scott likes Burp Castle because he too found himself overwhelmed by restaurant noise.
"I first noticed it dating in New York. Choosing venues became hard. I was nervous because you don't know what you'll get. Will it be quiet? And I realised one night, I just couldn't make out a single thing my date was saying.
"It made me feel frustrated. Awkward. Everything was just so loud."
So Scott did what anyone would do. He designed SoundPrint, the app that discovered London is motorbike-loud and let people publish restaurant decibels. Scott found an army of people desperate to "be heard over the noise".
And by noise, he means ...
"The clatter of knives. Chairs scraping concrete. The bar, the shouts. The espresso machine just roaring. Conversations overheard because people are squished together. The guys a few tables down, talking loudly because the [music] speaker above them is angled right at them, and that means the table next to them have to talk even louder to be heard ... "
"The Lombard effect!" Carl Hopkins says.
Prof Carl Hopkins PhD BEng CEng MASA MIIAV FIOA has so many letters after his name that when you first get an email from him you worry he has collapsed on his keyboard.
He is the head of the acoustics research unit at the University of Liverpool and when we speak about ever noisier restaurant chatter he says, "The Lombard effect is the involuntary tendency we have to increase our vocal effort in loud places to make sure other people can hear us."
This doesn't just increase volume, he says. It also changes the very way we speak: pitch, tone, rate and even the duration of our syllables.
"And as the restaurant starts to fill up with customers, everyone needs to talk louder in their group to be heard, and the level increases until everybody is basically shouting."
Now include music from some devious ceiling speaker and we're forced to talk louder still. Add a heavy pour of pinot noir and our usual social inhibitions disappear altogether.
Hopkins thinks restaurants should take care to limit that extra sound. Problem is, that's not fashionable; it's not the 1980s and these are not absorptive times. We are in reflective mood, because "right now restaurants like surfaces that reflect sound, not absorb it".
Forget thick velvet curtains. Forget tablecloths or the plush hush of shag pile. Think micro-concrete polished floors. Enormous windows and glazed facades. Exposed triple-height ceilings, metal pipework, wipe-clean surfaces, those super-thin water glasses that go "ting!" if someone even glances their way. Open kitchens "full of shiny, noise-generating tools", which I think is a very rude thing to call chefs.
Instead, restaurants should consider how to suck up the chatter and clatter.
"Carpets are sound absorbent," Hopkins says, "but they also absorb food and drink."
Jonathan Downey is a successful restaurateur launching a new place next month on London's Drury Lane, called Town, and he really doesn't want it carpeted.
"They're trip hazards and a bit suburban. Though you get them in old Mayfair restaurants; the ones where all the customers look half dead."
He wants a solid wood floor "but I'm concerned how it'll sound. We'll adapt, using 'sound baffling' where we can. We're using sound-absorbent tiles on columns and walls, we've got about 30 large panels in there, special paint, and we're avoiding flat surfaces. But you need people eating to know if it works."
At the least, there won't be tinkly piped-in music to compete with. "No chef should be playing Oasis. I don't know why so many places play Oasis. I don't want to sit in a restaurant listening to Oasis dribbling out of awful little speakers. If I wanted Radio 2 out of a tinny speaker, I'd eat in my car."
Downey has launched bars and restaurants across London, and in Somerset, New York and Chamonix. He likes the detail of it all, "the lighting, the smell, the sound — the whole experience.
"The chairs."
The chairs?
"Chairs are a key consideration," he says.
"We're looking at the chairs and thinking, 'Is this a two-hour chair or a four-hour chair?' If it's a two-hour chair, can we make it a four-hour chair with a seat pad, or by adding arms? A lot of people want customers in and out. I want them to feel like they want to come back next week with friends. So we spend time in every chair at every table, and we ask, 'Is this a good place to sit? Am I at ease? Can I hear?"'
A restaurant can't thrive in a fug of sound, he says. "You want it to buzz. You want it to hum. But you want your table to feel private because you can't hear the conversations of others and others can't hear yours."
And if there is music, it should be "something that people like without even knowing what it is".
"Done wrong, music is annoying, distracting. Done right, it massively impacts your night without drawing focus. Like a Hans Zimmer score. Like a soundtrack to the evening."
Lars Bork Andersen is resident soundtrack designer at Alchemist — the two-Michelin-starred Rasmus Munk restaurant in Refshaleoen, a remote and industrial part of Copenhagen — for which you need six-hour chairs.
For $NZ1332 a head, diners are served nearly 50 bite-sized dishes, including a sheep's brain filled with cherry sauce and a freeze-dried butterfly.
"I definitely see [what I do] as a score," Andersen says. "I see it as one big six-hour soundtrack."
Usually, he says, restaurants pump out loud music to mask mundane backstage sounds — plates clearing, cutlery dumped into sinks, empty bottles bashing metal bins — and as a tool to "force people to think they are having a good time".
But sound can bring good times more effectively: what Andersen does is ditch three-minute dad rock and create a rolling ambience that gets people to hyper-focus on the evening.
"Music that has background emotional impact. As if the music in the restaurant was part of the tapestry, or like the paint on the walls."
Dramatic audio moments may silence a room as a dish is served under projections cast on to a vast 3-D dome above, before the sounds retreat and the room fills with excited chatter and the rare noise of shared joy.
"Some of the dishes have political messages," he says. "Maybe about plastic in oceans."
(Diners are served a piece of cod with edible "plastic".)
"And I'll create an underwater soundscape. Or we have this one ice-cream which is shaped like a droplet of blood."
(It's a pig's blood ice-cream.)
"And there's a QR code on the plate. And you scan it to become an organ donor. And there is a big beating heart in the middle of the dome. And soft music. And the sound of rhythmic heartbeats.
"With red colours, and blood vessels flowing. And, visually, you look up and you are in a chest cavity."
"I'm sure it's wonderful," I say. "But it sounds horrific."
"But people will start talking about these topics. Talking together. About recycling. Or child labour. With the space for them to do this given by the support of the soundtrack."
Ronnie van der Veer is a foley artist based just outside Amsterdam, creating sound effects for film and television — including, of course, hundreds of dining scenes.
He seems a good person to ask what restaurants should sound like.
"When I think about what annoys me in a restaurant," he says, "it's usually sharp sound. Knives and forks clinking. Loud conversation. Echoes that make five people sound like 20. You also don't want a silent restaurant. I think 'mellow' is the word."
He's got a particular dislike of glass.
"Glass tables. Glass walls. Glass makes everything sound harsh.
"Imagine the noise of a wine glass set down quickly on a glass table. It immediately makes you uneasy."
He says a good restaurant "does not surprise you" with noise.
"The worst sounds are those that interrupt focus. Sharp sounds, scraping. As an audio artist, you don't want to distract your audience. You want a sense of distance from others. In my studio, I choose my props carefully for sound quality.
"Restaurants should do the same. So I choose glasses that have a nice ring. Crystal glasses sound much nicer than, say, an Ikea glass. Some knives sound too dull or aggressive when placed on a table, so I pick ones with a pleasing tone. Small things like the right combination of knife and plate can make an enormous difference."
The last time Scott left the kind of noisy New York restaurant that triggered the birth of an app, it was with "a sense of complete relief. When you get out of a place like that your shoulders are lighter. You can breathe again. Hear again. The world is quieter again".
He knows he is not alone. He knows because of the emails he gets from other people who fail to understand why eating out should require ear defenders or employing a live subtitler.
So is this a rant? I hope not. I hope it's just seeing if we can all agree that restaurants aren't supposed to make you feel pleased to be back out on the street again.
The best restaurants make you pleased someone chose the right combination of knife and plate, even if you have no idea they did.
They make you delighted someone has gone to the trouble of thinking about a four-hour chair, even if the thought of one never crossed your mind. And they make you relieved you don't have to tell your date that you'd rather get out of here and head instead to a little place in the East Village you only just read about.
A quiet corner, where you can hear me, and I can hear you, and which I am going to mumble the name of, so you don't quite understand when I tell you it's called Burp Castle. Sound check
Check out Soundprint for its Otago restaurant noise ratings which go from a quiet 60dB in some local cafes to a very loud 85dB at some of the region's burger joints. — The Observer