For Valentine's Day my husband took me on a delayed surprise trip to a surprise destination. Do you remember when dining in the dark was a trending thing? Steve found there is a restaurant doing just that in Vancouver. While it's no longer trendy it's still a fascinating and fun thing to try! We ended up at Dark Table.
Of course all my photos are from outside. You are greeted outside, order from a menu there, then wait for your server to come and retrieve you. Steve found out there are five servers covering twenty-five tables. The cool thing is the workforce is mainly blind or visually impaired, making it a wonderful employer for the non-sighted in a tough job market. And the most able people to guide you in the experience. Once you enter thru the doors you are entirely in their hands.
And that is when the adventure begins. The led us to the restrooms first (we had just driven up from Bellingham after all!). You travel thru curtains before hitting the bathrooms which have lowered lights. When we came back out to the curtained area we waiting in a scrum of people for our server to retrieve us.
And though we really enjoyed the food, our server really made the evening for us. She was named Rose and told us to yell for her if we needed anything "just like on the Titanic!" She was hysterical and incredibly comfortable with us. She led us carefully thru the restaurant with hands on shoulders, flawlessly handed us drinks and food (both hot and cold) and made the meal incredibly fun.
The cons of eating there? There were a couple of times when we had "air bites"...where we brought the fork up to our mouths and there was no food on it! The other thing we found that was funny was not being able to pace ourselves. When you were eating your dessert all of a sudden you realized you were done!
The pros? One is you get to see if you know food like you think you do. You order your main course and drinks, then the rest is a surprise. We found we were pretty good at figuring out the ingredients in the salad. And maybe we figured out our dessert!
And the best thing? An evening to fully focus on one another. We were fully unplugged. And there was nothing to distract us. We didn't find ourselves checking out what everyone was doing. Just one another's voice across the table. And each others hand when we could find them!
The waitress claimed that at least a couple a week has to leave because the dark is too much. And I can't even describe how dark it is! Do you think you would enjoy it?
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