I’ll Have the Special. What Did You Say It Was?

Rodger Morrow

Editor & Publisher, Beaver County Almanac

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There was a time when people went to a restaurant for dinner and conversation. You asked your companion how things were going and found out before the check came.

Now you ask, lean across the table and watch a mouth move. You nod sympathetically and hope you have not just approved of a death in the family.

Across southwestern Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio, and the West Virginia panhandle, finding a place to eat is easy. Finding one where you can hear the person you brought is a separate expedition. We have hand-cut steaks and cocktails made with things that used to stay in the garden. An audible sentence is harder to come by.

The usual explanation is that we are getting older. This is true, and no help. We are also paying.

Age does make it harder to pick speech out of noise. But the dining room has been doing its part. A restaurant furnished like a loading dock sounds like a loading dock, even if the loading dock serves a respectable sea bass.

Consider the modern interior: exposed brick, concrete floor, bare tables, glass, metal, and a ceiling high enough to garage a modest dirigible. Nearly everything throws sound back into the room.

The carpet is gone. So are the heavy curtains, the upholstered booths, and the tablecloths. These were apparently holding civilization back. They were also soaking up its racket.

The open kitchen adds its own voice. The pans, the exhaust fans, and the machinery all join the conversation. The chef may be performing beautifully. The dishwasher has excellent projection.

The sound lingers, bouncing from surface to surface. Your neighbor’s opinion of the Steelers does not leave when he finishes stating it. It hangs around to interfere with your wife’s account of her afternoon.

Then human nature takes over. Scientists call it the Lombard effect: as background noise rises, people raise their voices without meaning to. That raises the noise, which makes everybody try harder.

You speak up because the next table is loud. The next table speaks up because you are loud. Soon everyone is addressing a public meeting nobody remembers calling.

Management calls this a lively atmosphere. It is fine until you need to say something more complicated than “Yes.”

Owners have their reasons. Hard surfaces are easy to clean and hard to ruin. Nobody need believe restaurateurs meet in secret to plot against your anniversary. Still, when quiet loses every budget argument, the customer inherits the noise.

A customer who skips dessert, declines a second glass of wine, and never comes back is harder to account for. Research with older adults has found that as restaurant noise goes up, their willingness to linger and spend goes down. This should interest anyone whose living depends on seated customers.

Around Beaver County, some older dining rooms offer hope. Reviewers of the Wooden Angel in Beaver have described it as a place for a quiet dinner. Still, no restaurant can promise that the next table won’t be celebrating something with exceptional lung capacity.

Carpet and upholstery absorb sound, and upholstered booths help keep the whole room from joining every conversation. Old brick and old wood, however, do not perform this service merely by being old. Age is no more an acoustic strategy for buildings than it is for customers.

For deliberate design, consider Sewickley Tavern. Studio St. Germain’s account of its renovation describes an acoustical plaster ceiling, a microperforated tin ceiling for added absorption, and sensors monitoring noise in the dining room and kitchen. Somebody put hearing in the plans and gave the sound somewhere to go besides the next customer.

Nobody is proposing that the waiter hand out felt slippers or that birthdays be observed by written statement. A little clatter belongs at dinner. So does laughter. Hear the laughter at your own table.

Until more owners grasp the distinction, customers will have to become amateur acousticians. Ask for a table away from the speakers, the bar, and the kitchen. Look for upholstered seats and room between tables. “Do you have a quiet table?” ought to be as ordinary a question as “Where do I park?”

Restaurants across the tri-state area could advertise a room where friends can catch up and business associates can finish a sentence without passing notes. Some of us would drive a long way for that. We might even order dessert.

This region spent generations making steel amid tremendous noise. We understood that earning a living came with a racket. Dinner was supposed to be what came after.