'Can You Turn It Down?'

Forget bad food or lousy service — diners are making their true pet peeve known loud and clear

What’s the biggest complaint about restaurants?

I’ll overlook the dead rat under my table during a business dinner last year at a seafood restaurant in Tampa, and the waiter who nonchalantly asked, when I pointed it out, “Did you kill it?”  

In fact, the No. 1 complaint about restaurants isn’t service, bad food, diners climbing on chairs to take selfies, or sanitation, it’s ... (no drumroll, please) noise. In its 2018 Dining Trends Survey, the restaurant ratings outfit Zagat found that noise has edged out poor service as the top complaint people have about restaurants. Consumer Reports magazine has found the same.

It doesn’t matter how old you are or how generally conditioned your hearing is to high decibels. A recent headline on the news site Vox.com sums it up: “Restaurants are too freaking loud.”

There are a lot of reasons for restaurants being so noisy you can’t converse with your dinner companions — or, if you try to, that your shouting simply adds even more to the din. Too-loud recorded music is just one of the culprits. Others include modern restaurant design that favors hard surfaces and high ceilings, with a trend away from the noise abatement effect that even a tablecloth can add.

There is some pushback, I’m happy to say. Companies that specialize in noise reduction and acoustics for restaurants – selling sound paneling, ceiling and carpet tiles and the like – are aggressively promoting design renovations to the industry. The Acoustical Society of America, at its meeting scheduled for Louisville, Kentucky, in mid-May, has a session devoted to restaurant noise, with a note in the program-schedule saying that more and more patrons and restaurant owners are “acknowledging acoustical comfort” as a factor in the successful dining experience.

Then there is Gregory Farber, a research analyst who has been getting lots of ink in the last year thanks to a free app he created and manages, SoundPrint, which The New Yorker magazine called a “Yelp for noise.” Tap on the SoundPrint app anywhere you’re dining or drinking and you can get a decibel meter that displays the restaurant noise level through four stages, from quiet (70 decibels or lower) to very loud (over 81 decibels, basically belt-grinder level). Another tap sends your reading to a nationwide SoundPrint databank listing restaurants by sound levels. That data bank even has a category called “Quiet Lists,” with quiet restaurants arranged by city. SoundPrint says it has more than 60,000 submissions from customers at restaurants and bars across the nation.

Are restaurants complaining about being din-shamed? “We thought there would be more complaints,” Farber told me. “Many restaurants that we’ve spoken to acknowledge that their venues are just too noisy” and have sought advice on noise-mitigation, he said. Fast Company magazine gives SoundPrint an honorable mention in the apps category in its “World Changing Ideas 2019” survey.

Of course, some people actually enjoy noise, or at least a measure of what some might regard as comforting background noise.

Naturally, there is an app for that, which appeals to those working alone, say in a hotel room, who crave the acoustical ambiance of, say, a crowded Starbucks.

A site called MyNoise.net has a feature called Café Restaurant with an adjustable noise generator that plays muffled background sounds (without distracting discernable words) of a busy coffee shop. It’s billed as “The noise without the social distraction.”

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