Why do restaurant owners persist with such dim light?

Do you find that most restaurants —especially the fancier ones — are much too dark these days?

I certainly do. And I have a general rule. If the light is too “atmospheric” for me to actually see the food on my plate, I just get up and walk out.

 

Restaurants were never meant to be dimly lit.  Ask your parents and they will tell you that some bars and most nightclubs have always favoured dim lighting on the grounds that it suits the mood. But restaurants were always lit well enough for you to be able to read the menu and to see what you were eating.

 

   In recent years, this rule has been turned on its head. It started with bars, where the golden rule was that if you raised the volume of the music and lowered the lighting, you would make the place feel ‘’hip’. Guests could go and have conversation anywhere else, the bar-designers said. But when they came to their bars they did not want to do anything as boring as chat. They wanted to feel that they were in a special, highly designed environment.

 

   Well maybe. But that wasn’t the whole story. There were other advantages. Low lighting created a sexier vibe. And as many people who go to trendy bars have a romantic/lust-filled interest in each other, they liked the idea of drinking in dim light. Of course it helped that dim lighting made everyone seem more attractive and hid the blemishes that might otherwise have been visible.

 

   This is not just a hypothesis. People in the business will tell you that bars that have turned up the music and dimmed the lights have seen sales go up. Of course, this is not true of the clubby bars where people meet to discuss deals or actually enjoy their drinks. But the growth sector in the bar business is the dimly lit bar.

 

   I would rather slash both my wrists with a rusty razor than waste an evening in a bar where all conversation was impossible and the lighting were so bad that I risked bumping into the next table every time I stood up from my chair. But I do not dispute that the most successful bars these days are those where you surrender your powers of light and sound to a DJ and a highly paid low-lighting designer.

 

   Restaurants, on the other hand, fall into a different category. If you want to go to a restaurant where you can’t see the food or hear anyone on your table speak, then my advice is to go to a bar and later order a Burger King or KFC take-out on the way home as a stomach-filler. If you want to go to restaurants that have the ambience of trendy bars, then you probably don’t like food anyway.

 

"People who understand the business will never make this mistake. You will never face any difficulty in reading the menu at Bukhara or Indian Accent."

   In my, admittedly old fashioned, view, you should be able to read the menu at a restaurant when you go out for dinner without having to turn on the torch on your phone. At more and more restaurants, even the management recognizes that you will not be able to do this because the lighting is so dim. Therefore, they are ready with a little lamp that you clip on to the menu. Usually, their own lamp rarely emits a light that covers the whole menu so you are better off with your phone torch anyway.

 

   On the other hand, I also recognise that all of us have eyesight of varying strength so perhaps there are people —like Superman maybe — who have such good vision that they don’t need extra light to read the menu. Hell, Superman could probably read the menu at the restaurant next door with his X-Ray vision.

 

   But I do like looking at my food. And yet many restaurants are so badly lit that you can barely make out what is on your plate. If you have ever gone to a restaurant kitchen you will know that it is brightly lit and that when the chef prepares the plate with your food on it, he looks at it under the glare of bright, light. This same plate is then taken to a dimly lit table and of course, every little decorative touch that the chef has put on the plate is no longer visible. At some restaurants I have to guess whether I am eating chicken or fish because the lighting is so low that I can't tell by just looking at the plate. (And at some restaurants I can’t even tell if it is really chicken or fish, even after tasting the dish — but that’s another story.)

 

   None of this seems to bother restaurant owners. Not only are the plates prepared in bright light but when they are photographed — for the menu or for publicity purposes — the photographers use fancy lights to show them off to their best advantage. And yet when they reach the table, the guest can barely make out what the hell is being served to him or her.

 

   There is now a new problem which too many restaurant owners seem unaware of. They recognise that prominence on Instagram is often the cheapest and most effective way of drumming up business. But, for the Instagram post to look good, the restaurant must have enough light. This is the bit they don’t understand I have lost count of the number of restaurants where the lighting is so bad that it is virtually impossible to take a good photo for Instagram. Even if you can tell what is on the plate, the lighting will be so poorly designed that shadows will cover the food. (This is why the best insta/photos of food are usually taken at lunchtime when you can use natural light and when the owners have not dimmed the lights to extremely low levels.)

 

   Given all this – the inability to see your food, the instagram problems etc. —why do restaurant owners persist with such dim light? One good reason is that there are still plenty of non-foodie guests who find a dimly-lit restaurant ‘romantic’. Another is that dim light covers a multitude of sins from dirty walls to staff uniforms that have not recently been cleaned.

 

   But mostly it is because the guys who design the lighting don’t worry about the people who actually have to eat at the restaurant. They just want something that looks cool and sophisticated (or what they think ‘cool and sophisticated’ means).

 

   People who understand the business will never make this mistake. You will never face any difficulty in reading the menu at Bukhara or Indian Accent. I once went, many years ago, to a pre-opening dinner at the Mumbai Ziya with Biki Oberoi. He spent at least an hour, before we even ordered, changing the lighting till he got the effect he wanted. (The restaurant was formally opening in a week.)

 

   So here’s my theory. People who understand food want you to enjoy the restaurant experience. People who don’t care about food only want to their places to look ‘cool’. So if you go to a restaurant with very dim lighting, leave. The food will probably be crap anyway.