A new Goldman State Podcast drops every Friday!

Feb 3, 2025

Let’s Dine Out! You Bring the Earplugs!

Has volume of noise replaced volume of portions?

By Ed Goldman

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, we thought highly of a restaurant if its food reminded us of home cooking. Today, when we have dinner guests in our home, the top compliment is that the meal we made for them “was like something you’d get in a restaurant.” I always like to believe they mean the chow, not the wait, bill or post-prandial dyspepsia.

The dining-out “experience,” which we used to refer to as “dining out,” has certainly changed, and we along with it. 

Edgy Cartoon

Noisetown

Years ago, the only music you heard in a restaurant was either “live” or recorded mariachi in Mexican places; harps and strings in French joints, and toothless jazz (think Kenny Loggins, not Miles Davis) in brick-walled bistros intended to create a safe place for suburban hipsters to discuss foreign films they saw years ago in college. 

We also used what parents called our “indoor” voices in most eateries, save Chuck E. Cheese, Buca di Beppo and those sports bars with 25 TV sets blaring games from not only around the U.S. but also continents you could never find on a map, even if you had a GPS chip installed in your brain. (This wouldn’t be a bad idea, would it? If they can help us find our cats, why not ourselves. Too metaphysical?)

Nowadays—just using that word makes me feel like it may be time to go home and get my affairs in order—the noise level in restaurants has increased almost exponentially. It’s often attributed to lousy insulation and a dearth of soundproofing materials in floors, ceilings and walls. But I actually think we’re the ones who could use some soundproofing.

If people get irritated by the sound volume when they dine out, the usual suspects are babies, who don’t know any better, or tykes, whom parents should know how to gag (“No dessert if you don’t pipe down!” is coarse but probably a still-effective deterrent. So, I’m told, is pouring crushed Adderall into their juice boxes). 

But in my, forgive the word, experience, the worst offenders are adults. No, make that adults who think the more wine they drink, the more fun they’re having. When a group of them get together, they always seem to include a guy with a piercing nasal voice who bursts out laughing at everything he says, perhaps under the delusion that when the bill comes the rest of the table will insist on treating him because he was the life of their party. 

There also seems to be a woman who was told she had a cute laugh when she was a perpetually hoarse cheerleader 40 years ago and now screams like a banshee at every opportunity. It seems unnecessary to point out that she’s not married to the guy with the piercing nasal voice. They’d have been hauled in on domestic-violence charges a week after their honeymoon. If you look at their table, they’re usually accompanied by soft-spoken individuals leading lives of quiet desperation. Or wearing Mack’s silicon ear plugs®. Or, most likely, both.

At one time, it was a cliché (but true) that a couple used to go to a restaurant to end their relationship, though it’s safe to say only one of them knew it was coming. The idea was that the person about to have his or her heart broken wouldn’t dare to make a “scene” in such relatively dignified surroundings.

Well, we can kiss that charming notion goodbye. These days, if one of both members of a couple not only began to scream at each other but also bend utensils Uri Geller-style (except that this would be on each other’s faces, not via mental projection), the most we could expect would be that a watchful restaurant manager would suggest they go into the bar for a nice drink or would escort them to a driverless cab. 

Note: That cab might be driverless only because the cabbie is on a dinner break at a place whose menu reminds him of home. Where it’s also quiet.

Ed Goldman's column appears almost every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. A former daily columnist for the Sacramento Business Journal, as well as monthly columnist for Sacramento Magazine and Comstock’s Business Magazine, he’s the author of five books, two plays and one musical (so far).