When do you prefer a loud restaurant? How about a quiet one?
There are a few restaurants in town that I just can’t patronize anymore. When I visit with friends, I can’t hear the conversation. And my hearing isn’t even that far gone yet.
Sometimes, you’re looking for a hoppin’ spot, with a lot of action and activity. The conversation and the company isn’t as important as the spectacle, right? Sometimes, you want a place where you can cozy up for a good conversation.
Toward that end, our restaurant critic Joe Bonwich is reporting that we’ll be adding “sound ratings” to our restaurant reviews, in collaboration with the audiology program at Washington University.
Michael Valente, director of adult audiology and professor in the Washington University School of Medicine, was hearing a recurring complaint from his patients.
“We have about 13,000 patients, and one of the most common complaints is that many restaurants are so noisy that people can’t communicate,” Valente said.
The idea: Give diners a heads-up on what to expect when they visit one restaurant versus another.
Have you had experiences with restaurants that were too loud? Do you like it if the joint is jumping?
Kurt is the director of social media for the Post-Dispatch, where he has worked since August 2002. He's been a journalist since 1982, covering municipal government, courts, education and two hurricanes as a reporter before becoming an editor. 
Wow, there are some crabby people in this world! With that said, normally, when we’re planning to go out to dinner, we take into account what day of the week it is and what time of day it is. Of course a restaurant is going to be louder on a Friday at 6 than it is on a Tuesday at 4. You also have to consider what sort of place you’re going. Of course a sports bar during happy hour is going to be louder than other places.
Now that I have a 1 year old, I certainly am more consious of where we go when. Thankfully, my daughter is pretty well behaved (comments from people when we go out to dinner and on a plane have confirmed this) so we havne’t gotten the dirty looks we used to give when around parents who are oblivious to the noise their kids are making.
Personally, I feel noise level IS subjective so I’m not sure how a reviewer can rate this. Although, sometimes restaurant experiences are subjective as well, so like most reviews, you almost have to take what they say with a grain of salt then go and form your own opinions.
Christine, a growing number of bars and restaurants in St. Louis, despite the threat of a smoking ban, are installing air filtration systems to take all the junk out of their air, not just tobacco smoke. The improvement in their air quality is dramatic. I wish the Post would do a story on this.
These systems are quiet too.
http://www.marthbrothers.com/Indoor_Enviro_Solutions.html
Great. Now we can add “It’s too noisy in here!” to the list of things aging Baby Boomers demand to know before they eat out. They already gripe about smoking, the number of toilets, and whether they can get their walkers in the front door. The next step will be when Joe Bonwich describes the softness of the creamed corn and which eateries offer their customers complimentary Depends.
Bob Evans is open for dinner at 4pm. Go there and leave the rest of us alone!
You can be in a very quiet restaurant where theres just one very loud speaking person that causes annoyance. I had that happen to me just last week, he was sitting behind me and he knew almost everyone that walked in the place and started a conversation. I couldn’t talk or hear anything but his conversations. It was annoying but hey, that’s life! Get over it!
Its a shame that the PD waste it time on something so trite and trivia.In the PD’s glory days it was the issues of war,provety,racism,social in-justice,political corruption,etc.Now the PD wastes its efforts on something as travia as noise levels in restraunts.How sad.
Seems like at least a few of the commenters have missed the key points of the system, the main being that I’m not doing this, and the rating is as empirically objective as possible.
It’s going to be done by grad students working on their doctorates in audiology under the supervision of an expert in sound measurement. They’ll be going to the restaurants in prime time on busy nights, and the measurements take average sound readings over an extended time period.
It’s also just a data point: If you’re bothered by loud restaurants, you’ll have a factually comparable measurement for deciding whether or not to go, much the same way as if you’re bothered by smoke, a restaurant’s decision to be smoke-free might influence your choice of where to go.
Loud restaurant? Never. A little noise and bustle, sure. But the only time I like loud is after I’ve spent the evening with my 94-year-old mother. She needs particularly quiet places to hold any kind of conversation since she can’t hear much of anything. After 2-3 hours of that, and the slow-motion pace that’s all she can manage, give me loud music, give me dancing, give me noise and activity. But that’s in a bar, not a restaurant.
We recently went to dinner to celebrate my wife’s birthday. I bought her one of those embarassing musical cards. The restaurant was so loud she had to hold the card up to her ear to hear it. Of course, no one else could hear it either. The food was good, but I’ll think twice before going there again.
Come on Joe! You can’t honestly expect these people to READ THE STORY before commenting on it, can you! I think it’s great that you’ll be reporting actual data regarding restaraunt’s noise levels during prime times. I refuse to go to places where all the lemmings go during rush hour. TGIF, The Olive Garden, Casa Gallardo. They practically stack the tables on top of each other so they can seat more sheep for more plain fare. Then you have 100 people standing in the lobby waiting for 45 minutes as if there were no other food in the world to be had. Those places are so loud at those times, one can’t hear themselves think, not that many of the people standing there waiting are doing much thinking….
NEVER! Never, ever, ever! If a restaurant is so loud that I’m distracted and can’t hear a conversation, I will not return to it.