Dans Le Noir?

Oh my goodness. Dans Le Noir is a somewhat alternative restaurant in London, and it is amazing. A completely bizarre, scary and fascinating dining experience that I highly recommend you all try.

Yesterday, my mum surprised me with a trip to London for my birthday. We got on the train to London, then took the tube to Farringdon for a very different sort of lunch time dining experience.

For those of you that have seen the iconic, pitch black scene in About Time with Donald Gleeson and Rachel McAdams (if you haven't then you seriously need to. Right now. It's beautiful) then you may already have had the temptation of finding out for yourself what Dans Le Noir is really like.

If you haven't yet heard of this dining experience, let me set the scene for you: It's dark. Really dark. Imagine dark, and then make it more dark. That's what it's like. Not even being able to see your hands in front of your eyes kind of dark. It's intense.

For those of you that don't know, Dans Le Noir (translating to in the dark) is a restaurant where diners eat in complete and utter pitch black. You are served food by blind waiting staff, and choose your food from a surprise menu of meat, fish, vegetarian or vegan courses.

Not only that, but you also get to choose between a two or three course menu, with wine and/or a surprise cocktail.

The experience is unforgettable. Which is odd, because looking back at it now, my memories of the place are of course, just blackness. I have no idea what the room looked like, where in the room I was sat, or how my food was presented.

All you have to recall your surroundings comes from your sense of touch, which is heightened due to the lack of sight.

The dark made the room seem small, but could seat up to 60 people at one time.

We had a lovely waiter with a good sense of humour, who tapped me on the shoulder to state his presence, before instructing us on how to take our food and drinks from him.

We were handed plates across the table, which I did headbutt once, but I found I got used to the sensation of fumbling for my food rather quickly.

We were also encouraged to pour our own water as part of the experience, which only became more risky as the table filled with glasses of drinks to acompany each course.

What I found quite nice, was that we were not seated at individual tables, but a set of tables next to other diners.

Once I had gotten over the confusion of locating the people next to us because I couldn't figure out where their voices were coming from, it was nice how much we talked.

In your average restaurant, you would not usually sit down and chat so much with the people at the table next to you.

It became more about sharing the experience with the room, full of people you did not know and could not see. We wouldn't have even known if we had seen the couple next to us after our meal. All we have is the memory of their voices, which I find quite wonderful.

Having a surprise menu was fascinating. Eating in the dark changes your interaction with food, as your hands are far more involved, and your taste buds mistake regular flavours for something unrecognisable because it hasn't been named.

I won't share with you what we did eat. The menu, although it changes every so often, should be kept on a low-down so that you are still left surprised when you try the food for yourself.

One thing I will share, is the bizarre moment at the end of my main course, when I had just about got the hang of getting food onto my fork, (the first few times failing miserably and feeding myself empty mouthfuls) I scooped up an unexpected and unwelcome visitor to my taste buds.

A caper berry.

In the light, I hate caper berries. As it turns out, in the dark I hate caper berries too. What was unusual, and completely out of character, was that as soon as the berry mushed into my mouth, I instinctively spat it straight back out again.

Oops.

Obviously, in a day to day restaurant I would never do that sort of thing. But it's almost as if my reflexes changed because of the environment I was in. I didn't consciously think about doing it because no-one could see me, it just happened. I was quite grateful for the darkness at that point.

As I was when I picked up my glass, thinking it was my wine and bringing it to my mouth, only to be stabbed in the eye by a straw from my cocktail glass.

And I'm sure the lady that our waiter told us a story about; the one who argued with her partner in the restaurant, and tried to stand up and leave, only to walk smack straight into a wall, was also quite grateful for the dark at that point.

I kept thinking of how entertaining the CCTV videos would be, and that they should sell you the footage of your meal so you can see how funny you looked when waving the napkins around in front of you to try and figure out what colour they were (*cough*mum*cough).

Above all, the experience actually became less about the food, and more about learning your surroundings and how to eat in an unfamiliar and fairly unnerving environment.

Perhaps that's why you are offered so much to drink for a lunch menu. To settle you into the darkness.

Once we had finished poking and prodding our food, smelling our wine and fumbling our hands across the table to pass each other drinks and cutlery, we announced to our waiter that we were ready to leave.

He got us to stand up, and find his shoulders to put our hands on, then lead us through god knows where until we reached the first set of black out curtains. He clapped as we walked, to let others know we were coming.

Once through the second, then final set of black out curtains, we were met by a dim read light and welcomed back into the main waiting area, where we found out what we had just been served for lunch.

That was a good surprise. Learning how right or wrong we were about the food that we had just eaten. Also, understanding how different my experience was to my mum's.

She sat through the whole meal with her eyes wide open, looking at nothing, taking it all in, whereas I tend to get a bit freaked out when I can't see what's in front of me, so relaxed into it by keeping my eyes closed for most of the meal.

It was hard to tell whether I was disorientated by the sheer contrast of light and dark when we were greeted by the outside world once again, or whether I was slightly tipsy from all the day drinking.

Admittedly, I found the experience so bizarre and entertaining that I did try and go to the loo afterwards with my eyes closed.

It was such a fascinating thing to do. It really made me appreciate the fact that this is a reality that some people face in their day-to-day lives, and how underestimated the difficulty of feeding yourself in the dark actually is.

Learning your surroundings by touch, in a dark room full of strangers, sounds like a bizarre thing to do, but is totally worth it. I would recommend it on the food alone, especially the pudding which was delicious, but all in all it is such an unusual and memorable thing to try.

I don't think anyone could have prepared me for quite how dark it really was.

What an experience.