Dinner talk,
From sports bars to hip bistros, the noise from wall-to-wall TV screens is deafening. DAVID SHERMAN wonders why we are so seduced by what’s on the tube instead of by our companion sitting across the table.
It makes sense. Open a restaurant and put up one, two or maybe 12 television screens and bring on the sports fans and the lonely hearts who likely eat in front of the TV at home and they won’t even notice the food’s overcooked and salty and slapped together by a 17-year-old with tattoos on his neck.
In classier joints, put up enough giant HD flat screens and you won’t care that your companion is checking her smartphone or working out her thumbs on the keypad, her preferred screen of the moment. Does it even matter what’s on the plate?
It’s almost impossible to hide from the flashing, shimmering screens. We live with multiple TV and computer screens and a few smartphones and tablets and maybe an e-reader or two in our homes.
Yes, you can eat your pot pie while being entertained with the sports highlights of a guy hammering his elbow into his semiconscious opponent’s face as blood pools beneath his fractured skull.
The pot pie at a pretty good pub in Westboro lost a little je ne sais quoi as I witnessed the aforementioned mutilation. Even though I’m probably as screen-crazed as the next guy, I’d think twice about returning.
Watching a game at another pub recently, I was distracted by several tables of people poring over their iPhones as they snuck glances at the TV screens coming at them from all directions.
Now you might want to go out for a good meal, sit around and talk with people you’d like to share an hour or two with, but there’s a good chance your eyes will be seduced by those HDs replaying bone-crushing bodychecks, commercials for ED drugs or a silent CNN stud standing in the middle of a savage storm looking as if any moment he’ll be joining Dorothy on a trip to Oz.
And if you find a restaurant not decorated with electronics I’m going to wager it’s going to set you back at least $100 without wine and you probably won’t be able to hear yourself think, let alone converse. The new hip places are about noise.
Last time the raucous voices of the wellheeled had me balking at chowing down at a popular place amenable to squeezing a friend and I into the last tiny table available, room enough if I checked my legs at the door, the hostess told us primly that people came for the noise.
Quiet dining has gone the way of screenless dining. At a fancy downtown eatery, famous for its fish, dinner for four with wine came to $400, but we walked out with sore throats and headaches from yelling at each other across the table. The music was pounding from speakers buried in the ceiling over our heads. Repeated requests from us and our neighbours to turn the music down were ignored. The throbbing roar of an electronic bass drum was as much a part of the ambience as the stuffy waiter and the $40 slab of fish.
Maybe with all the screens we’ve become accustomed to, we really don’t want to talk to each other anyway. And besides, you have your phone and it’s easier to just text your companion: “What R U havng?” “Dont no. U?”
From a quick rummage through the Internet, on computer and iPhone while the news plays silently on the flat screen across the room, I read there’s a revolt brewing.
People are saying enough with the TVs in public places. Do we need them over urinals and in elevators, as well as restaurants? Did the cab driver in Havana really need to watch a film from a screen embedded in his rear-view mirror as he drove me to my hotel?
People are complaining about noise, too. Where can we go for a quiet meal where there are no screens and the decibel level will not cause inflammation of the spine? Well, there’s Wendy’s and Tim’s. No screens there yet, least not that I remember, but I was immersed in hamburger heaven, hold the cheese, with a side of double-double, so I can’t be certain.
If you take out the screens and hold the noise with some prudent addition of acoustical tile and space between tables, we might learn to talk to each other again. We could discuss the news or the past-due bills or rumours of layoffs and that would sure as hell put a knot in the digestive tract.
Or talk about “us.” And do we really want to do that? Dredge up grievances that we left in the back of the fridge like last week’s chicken?
Are we perhaps more comfortable being bombarded by hi-rez images from TVs and tablets and smartphones, seduced by the miracles of technology, the fantasies of sport, even the images of faraway storms or crashing meteorites, than we are with each other, our friends and lovers and wives and husbands?
And the escape into the cacophony of sound and images, does it not offer us the break from reality we used to seek by simply going out?
As we eat more of our meals outside the home, the break we deserve today requires more watts. As life’s struggles ramped up, so did the stimulation needed to escape them.
So maybe it’s best to embrace the large screens and the high decibels. They are there to soothe the ravaged breast.
Or go out on a limb and eat at home. Turn off the screens, power off the phones, put the lid on the tablet, light a candle, dim the lights and ask your companion, “How was your day?”