Blind date
I had dinner in Zurich this week with three Swiss people and an expatriate Brit. We sat together and chatted for a couple of hours, but don’t ask me what they looked like. I couldn’t see them. Father Christmas dropped by halfway through the meal. I tugged him by the beard, so I knew who it was, but I never saw him either. Or the waitress, Elizabeth; or the barman; or indeed the bar; or the 60 or so other customers; or the piano I was sitting next to; or the food I ate. The room was pitch-black; the serving staff were blind; and the diners were, in effect, simulating total blindness.
The restaurant, Blindekuh (Blind Cow, which is the Swiss equivalent of blind man’s buff) has taken Switzerland by storm. My fellow diners, who had driven up from Lucerne, had booked four months ago. That wait is not unusual: weekends are full until April. The restaurant’s reputation is now spreading beyond the Swiss border: American restaurateurs have been in to assess the possibility of blind dining in the US; there is talk of franchising the Blind Cow concept across Europe; and last week the receptionist took a call from a restaurant owner in Ireland who wanted a precise description of the restaurant so that he could build one in Dublin.
The premises would, unfortunately for potential imitators, be hard to replicate. The restaurant is housed in a former Lutheran church, which perfectly fits this odd mix of philanthropy and commercialism (it is owned by the Blindlicht Foundation, set up by a blind clergyman called Jorge Spielmann to provide opportunities for blind people). Not all the staff are blind: the manager, Adrian Schaffner, is sighted, as is the receptionist, and all the kitchen staff except one. But the dozen or so waiters (most of whom work part time) are blind, as are some of the support staff.
Blindekuh opened in September last year. Spielmann’s foundation, which raised £200,000 to launch it, had a dual purpose: to provide work for blind people, and to give those who can see an insight into their world. “We hope to make people more sensitive to the problems of the blind,” says Schaffner. “It’s a new experience for diners: you take one sense away, so you have to use all the others much more.”
When you arrive, your bag and coat are put into a locker – it would be hazardous to leave anything on the floor of the dining room – and you step into a dimly lit ante-room which is supposed to acclimatise you to darkness (occasionally, guests find the blackness of the dining room too claustrophobic and have to leave). When your waiter arrives to greet you, you place your hands on her shoulders and are taken through the blackout curtain and into the dining room. The blind leading the blind.
The room is not merely dark; it is entirely devoid of light. The distinction is important: usually in darkness you can make out shadowy shapes; here you can see nothing. Your eyes work furiously to attempt to see something, but in vain, and the effort is so tiring that you have to close them. In dim light, they would be straining even harder.
The great challenge in eating blind is conversation. A conversation between sighted people relies on body language, facial expressions, eye contact: the words are just part of the interaction. Blind people depend to a much greater extent on their voice. “Usually, in a restaurant, everything is done with your eyes,” says Schaffner, “but here you put that away and suddenly everybody is the same. The quality of what you say counts: not your designer tie, not your shoes, not your fashion haircut, not whether you are beautiful or ugly, just your voice. If you don’t talk, you don’t exist.”
The restaurant has become a popular venue for blind dates: couples can meet and see how they get along without the distractions of what they look like and how they eat. In the restaurant, couples can stick to essentials; afterwards, in the lobby, they can check out the aesthetics.
The menu is small: three starters, a meat dish, a fish dish, a vegetarian option, a couple of desserts. The waiters either memorise what has been ordered or, for large parties, use a dictaphone. Eating and drinking is a challenge. Elizabeth encourages me to pour my own beer, which has to be done carefully, using the index finger of the left hand to check how full the glass is. You quickly realise that you have to keep your elbows off the table, a perception underlined by the sound of a bottle falling to the floor elsewhere in the restaurant.
I have no idea how large the room is, or how close the tables are together. It can seat no more than 60, and I was at a table for six, so there are perhaps a dozen tables. Noise levels are normal (ignore those who suggest that darkness makes people talk more loudly), and there is an awkward moment of silence when one of the revellers on my table makes a lewd remark (perhaps in the dark everyone is listening more intently).
Many large groups come to Blindekuh: families, office parties, but so far no wedding receptions (Schaffner thinks the bride would take offence). Clearly, part of the appeal is bonding: a strange, shared experience. It is arguable whether this brief, immobile immersion in darkness gives any real insight into blindness, but clearly it will make you look (or not look) at your friends, family, fellow diners in a different way.
Eating is messy. I courageously had borscht to start, which was surprisingly straightforward once I had located the spoon. But the beef, dumplings and assorted vegetables were trickier. Most of the dumplings went on the table, some of the vegetables ended up on the floor, and cutting meat is almost impossible. The solution is to abandon social niceties (irrelevant in the dark) and eat with your hands.
There may be something mildly transgressive in this whole enterprise. In Vladimir Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark, an unfaithful, gold-digging wife exploits her wealthy husband’s blindness by secretly installing her lover in their home. The husband’s presence heightens the illicit lovers’ passion. Who knows, perhaps my fellow diners were naked; perhaps Elizabeth was naked; perhaps Santa, behind that flowing white beard (I am making assumptions here) was naked. In the kingdom of the blind, the cock-eyed imagination is king. I curb my wilder fantasies. My sole transgression is to lick the dish after I’ve eaten my ice-cream.
Does the idea work? I would be intrigued to go with someone I knew, to see how the dynamic changed once we were deprived of all the usual props to conversation. It was difficult to gauge, talking to four total strangers. The restaurant claims that eating blind makes you think about the food more: you eat more slowly, sniff the food, touch it, savour it. But that is questionable: I wasn’t aware of the meal being slower, just messier. You do lose track of time, though: luminous watches have to be removed, mobile phones are not permitted, welcome to the void.
The challenge will be to retain the purity of the idea, especially if Blind Cows spring up elsewhere. The Zurich restaurant works because of the idealism of the founders (tempered by the management nous of Schaffner, who used to work for the Best Western hotel chain), the combination of eating and education (the restaurant also runs intensive afternoon sessions demonstrating what it is like to be blind), and the enthusiasm of the staff, especially the blind waiters who recognise that they have been given a unique opportunity (imagine, in any other context, the employment potential of a blind waiter). Trying to repeat the formula elsewhere will be a leap in the dark.
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