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The End of the Ear-Splitting Dining Room - Eater
Certain design trends have contributed to an increase in restaurant noise levels. As complaints grow, restaurants are taking action to bring the volume down
It’s Friday night. You walk into one of the city’s hottest restaurants and, like a wave, it hits you: There’s a 45-minute wait for a table, a mob at the bar, servers zigzagging across the dining room, and plates rolling out of the open kitchen. Everything appears to be normal — the restaurant is operating in a routine fashion — but you can’t hear yourself think because the din is deafening.
Over the past decade, some of the country’s top restaurant critics have observed increasingly high sound levels in restaurants. In 2008, when complaints about loud restaurants escalated, Washington Post critic Tom Sietsema added noise ratings to his dining column. Readers welcomed the addition of a sound check: critic Ryan Sutton (then at Bloomberg, now Eater NY’s chief critic) followed suit within the next year. In 2013, Eater NY’s Robert Sietsema wrote about how he used two decibel-measuring apps on his smartphone, declaring that “modern restaurants are too damn noisy”; a month later, New York’s Adam Platt would also lament that hushed dining rooms were a thing of the past.
By 2017, Gregory Scott, who suffers from hearing loss and was fed up with being unable to hear in restaurants, founded SoundPrint, an app dedicated to helping diners find quieter bars and restaurants (think Yelp for sound). The app’s internal decibel meter measures the actual noise level of any venue, which is then submitted to a SoundPrint database that anyone can access to find out if a given venue is quiet, loud, or very loud. The app has more than 60,000 restaurant submissions so far.
Certain design trends have contributed to an increase in restaurant noise levels. As complaints grow, restaurants are taking action to bring the volume down
It’s Friday night. You walk into one of the city’s hottest restaurants and, like a wave, it hits you: There’s a 45-minute wait for a table, a mob at the bar, servers zigzagging across the dining room, and plates rolling out of the open kitchen. Everything appears to be normal — the restaurant is operating in a routine fashion — but you can’t hear yourself think because the din is deafening.
Over the past decade, some of the country’s top restaurant critics have observed increasingly high sound levels in restaurants. In 2008, when complaints about loud restaurants escalated, Washington Post critic Tom Sietsema added noise ratings to his dining column. Readers welcomed the addition of a sound check: critic Ryan Sutton (then at Bloomberg, now Eater NY’s chief critic) followed suit within the next year. In 2013, Eater NY’s Robert Sietsema wrote about how he used two decibel-measuring apps on his smartphone, declaring that “modern restaurants are too damn noisy”; a month later, New York’s Adam Platt would also lament that hushed dining rooms were a thing of the past.
By 2017, Gregory Scott, who suffers from hearing loss and was fed up with being unable to hear in restaurants, founded SoundPrint, an app dedicated to helping diners find quieter bars and restaurants (think Yelp for sound). The app’s internal decibel meter measures the actual noise level of any venue, which is then submitted to a SoundPrint database that anyone can access to find out if a given venue is quiet, loud, or very loud. The app has more than 60,000 restaurant submissions so far.