Dining in the dark in Kuala Lumpur

While in Kuala Lumpur two weeks ago to preview Louis Vuitton’s 2013 pre-fall collection for Lifestyle Asia, we were presented with a city guide. It was my fifth visit to Malaysia and I was keen on doing something I’d never done before. Dining in the Dark caught my eye immediately. “Diners are treated to pre-dinner drinks and games, then ushered into the dining room to be served unknown recipes,” the description read. “Definitely for the adventurous!”

While still quite the novelty, the concept isn’t the first. Blindekuh in Zurich and Basel; Dans Le Noir in New York, Paris, London, Barcelona and St. Petersburg; Opaque in Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego; and Black Out in Tel Aviv, are just some of the restaurants where eating and drinking are done in pitch-black darkness. Dining in the Dark, though, is the newest one, having opened only last December 2012.

I read in an interview in Time Out Kuala Lumpur that owner Werner Kuhn started the restaurant not for charity, but rather to show people how inspiring and hardworking the visually impaired staff are, and that they are just as capable as sighted ones. He found his staff mostly from the Malaysian Association for the Blind (MAB).

The sense of touch

The restaurant is located in the nightlife district of Changkat. We went on a Wednesday, which is ladies’ night in Kuala Lumpur (free drinks for the ladies), so the area was packed. We were first led to the lounge where a large disco ball hung from the ceiling and a Hed Kandi poster on the wall. (Kuhn is a known restaurateur who owns several restaurants, bars and clubs within the vicinity). Over welcome drinks — a choice of either cranberry juice or sangria — we were invited to play a pre-dinner sensory game.

Blindfolded with eye masks, we were asked to fish four paper clips out of a bowl filled with uncooked rice and beans, relying purely on our sense of touch. My companions for the evening, Louis Vuitton Philippines’ Cindy Go and Philippine STAR YStyle contributor Geolette Esguerra, and I took turns, and we were all able to find the first three paperclips by delicately sifting through the rice with our fingers until we found the familiar touch of the steel wires, but none of us could find the last.

Complete Blackness

We had to surrender our cell phones and watches, anything that could possibly emit light, which they kept in lockers. Our hostess was a friendly Pinay named Anne. She told us that the staff who work in the dining room are all visually impaired or completely blind. The cheerful and soft-spoken restaurant manager Nicole was our guide. (In the same interview with Time Out KL, it says that she suffered from congenital glaucoma when she was a child, and her world became fully dark in her teens.)  She told us to hold onto her back and form a human train, advising us that it was going to be very dark. As the door slowly shut behind us, everything suddenly became pitch-black. Those who are afraid of the dark might let out a little scream. You really cannot see a thing.

Even I was a little nervous. Since I was the last in the chain, Nicole told me to stand still and not to move, while she sat Cindy and Nicole first. I’m not claustrophobic but I am sometimes afraid of the unknown. My thoughts wandered … where was I, exactly, and what if someone decided to creep up on me? Soon enough my paranoia was interrupted as Nicole guided me to my seat by describing to me how the table and chair looked like.

The four senses

Nicole served us our wine, a 2011 Placido Pinot Grigio, which we ordered beforehand, and water. We had to feel the shape of the glasses with our fingers to know which was which. She told us the cutleries to our left and our dessert spoon and fork were to our 12 o’ clock. When I identified a piece of cloth with my fingers to be the napkin, I folded it into the neck of my shirt bib-style — just in case anything would spill while I was chewing.

With every course, Nicole would meticulously describe the dish to be had, and the shape of the plate. It was a bit of a struggle jabbing the fork and knife into the dish at the beginning, not quite sure what we were stabbing at — if we were even stabbing at anything at all — but once we got the hang of it, we identified our first course to be some sort of salmon, an anonymous fried thing served with yogurt sauce, and then a tomato and mozzarella salad.

The second course came in the form of a soup, which we just drank straight from the cup, and easily identified as mushroom. The main course we guessed to be chicken (we couldn’t really describe it, we just knew it was chicken), farfalle pasta (thanks to the ribbon shapes), and chicken roulade (unable to see, all we could make out was that it was a hole, the stuffing had fallen in our attempt to raise it to our mouths). Dessert, we guessed, was tiramisu and caramelized bananas, molten chocolate cake, raspberry sherbet and fruits. The music of Enya played in the background, and there was even an intermission of a live piano performance.

No Distractions

During the course of our dinner, we were thoroughly engrossed in our conversations. I then realized that it had been a while since a conversation with the present company became the center of the dinner table. With the advent of technology, almost every meal I’ve had has someone looking at a cell phone, taking photos, tweeting, Facebooking, or Instagramming (I admit, I am very guilty of this!). Here we couldn’t see so we had no distractions, and gave our full attention to each other’s voices and stories. We were in the present 100-percent.

And then there was the trust. Since we couldn’t see, we had to rely on a guide to lead us through our meal. It was microcosm where this time, the blind led us.  All their descriptions were accurate, and they could “see” clearly in a world where we couldn’t. It also gave me a sense of appreciation for the sense of sight, which is something we sometimes take for granted. Without it, the world is a very different place.

When they told us that our coffee and tea would be served outside, we all cheered, “Thank God!” Just an hour and a half in the dark had made us miss being able to see so much already. They presented us the menu of what we had just had, and we saw that we got most of it correct! (The anonymous fried thing happened to be mixed fried vegetables, and the chicken was rosemary). It was an exercise to awaken the rest of our senses since the eyes couldn’t tell the brain what the food would taste like before our taste buds did. 

“Congratulations for having the guts to go in,” Kuhn told us on our way out. “Not everyone is brave enough to do so.” It’s a restaurant where the experience champions the food, bringing about many lessons and a greater sense of appreciation for most things we take for granted. I highly recommend dining in the dark — at least once. Seems like a lot of people agree, as among 1,188 restaurants in Kuala Lumpur, it ranks #1 on TripAdvisor.

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Dining in the Dark is open Tuesday to Sunday from 6:30 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. A four-course meal is priced at RM98++. It is located at 44A & 46A Changkat Bukit Bintang, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. For reservations, call +603-211- 0431, +601- 251-5797, e-mail info@dininginthedarkkl.com or visit http://www.dininginthedarkkl.com.

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You can reach me at http://www.twitter.com/cheryltiu or e-mail inbetweendeadlines@gmail.com .