Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.
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[Bob Hill] Amplified Dining S ix of us were ordering dinner in one of those peanut-shell- tossing locales — a Louisville-area restaurant chain in which the goobers come in copious amounts in small metal pails. Tat manufactured shtick works, apparently touching some primi- tive, atavistic nerve; me and some inner cave man happily, wan- tonly chucking uneaten culinary remains onto the floor — damn the crunchy mess and cleanup. Tere are evenings out I'd probably be satisfied with just that: endless buckets of peanuts and six glasses of unsweetened tea laced with Splenda — and lemons. I generally can't finish any meal after gorging myself on Jimmy Carter's favorite food group, anyway. But isn't all that part of what keeps drawing us back? The country music booming down on us was not of this languid, mournful, somebody-done- somebody-wrong variety. It was white noise. It was vibrating, ear-crashing, annoying. Te problem with this particular restaurant — and many other smaller, hollowed-out private restaurants of various stripes I've been in lately — was the noise, in this case the piercing, blaring, twangy country music raining down on us from speakers directly overhead. Hey, I lived in Texas five years. I like a lot of country music. I am, in fact, the proud author of a poignant, thoughtful, yet some- what bitter-sounding country ballad tentatively labeled "Why Don't You Take My Love and Shove It Up Your Heart." (Working refrain: It's been six long months, my darlin' And yet we're still apart. So why don't you take my love And shove it up your heart.) Te country music booming down on us was not of this languid, mournful, somebody-done-somebody-wrong variety. It was white noise. It was vibrating, ear-crashing, annoying. It was so loud the six of us could barely speak to one another. I looked around the restaurant wondering if this noise — this inability to carry on a normal conversation — seemed to be both- ering anyone else. It wasn't. Te people eating in our area were just leaning more forward and talking more loudly, which only amped up the overall volume in the room. [152] LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 11.12 We were mindless sheep in — of all places — a restaurant. Baaaaaaaaaaa. I don't know why that surprised me. We are increasingly a nation of overweight, undernourished, tone-deaf people. Tere's already too much noise everywhere in life — home, work, restaurants, politics — and our solution is to talk louder. I shucked a few more peanuts, flipped the shells onto the floor, put on my cave man face and marched out to the reception desk, where a young woman waited. "Could you turn down the music?" I asked, searching her face for any signs she believed I was just a cranky old man — an occasionally correct diagnosis. "Why does it have to be so loud?" "Sure," she said to the first question, ignoring the second, her face betraying no signs of age discrimination. I marched back to our table. Te music was turned down — a little — the blare muted a bit around the edges. So then I'm think- ing maybe we're just dealing with a semi-deaf restaurant manager — or a wait staff in need of boot-scootin' inspiration. When our waiter showed up I asked him why the music was so loud. He said it was a management decision; the restaurant's corporate image was "road house." All cowpokes and cowgirls with sensitive ears could apparently just mosey on out the door and over to Stillwater. "I don't like it myself," the waiter said. "It makes it difficult to take your orders." Te kid obviously has a future in a non-corpo- rate environment. Even without a larger tip necessarily riding on the outcome, he agreed to go ask management one more time to turn down the music. He succeeded. Conversation suddenly became possible. Te banging country twang — temporarily at least — had ridden off into the sunset. We seemed to be the only people in the restaurant that noticed. Sure there are sports bars and nightclubs deliberately designed to be much too clamorous for any real conversation. Where else could young couples meet a few years before their first divorce? And all restaurant chains have their shticks: Cracker Barrel will offer a front porch lined in rocking chairs, dependable food, shop- ping fodder for Grandma and Grandpa just inside, a location a half-mile back along the expressway. A recent New York Times article told of all the engineering, re- search and consulting that goes into menus, including how and where to best place the dollar signs, if at all. Menu colors appar- ently matter — red and blue may stimulate appetite. Some restau- rants will use "decoys" — placing the really expensive item on top so others appear less expensive. Fine; we're all fair game. Bring it on. Serve it up. All I'm asking for is a quiet place to eat and talk about it.