Is dim lighting ruining your dinner?

A few weeks ago, a friend shared a dining-out fiasco. She was at dinner with her husband and his colleague. The restaurant was dimly lit. My friend, who is in her 40s and wears glasses, could not read the tiny font on the menu, and ended up ordering the most expensive dish. The colleague was paying, and though it had been a mistake, it looked unseemly to have ordered it.

Eating out, especially at a high-end restaurant, has become a dining-in-the-dark experience. I recently visited an Italian restaurant in Delhi, where the food and ambience were impeccable, but reading the menu was a challenge.

Under the dim light, I struggled to decipher the names of the dishes through my bifocal glasses. It did not help that each dish had a three-line description in an even tinier font. The restaurant had to place a lamp on the small table so I could look at the menu, leaving little space for our plates.

For restaurants, setting the mood is a large part of the fine-dining experience. “Playing with shadow and light gives us some stunning moody spaces that make us feel comfortable and intimate,” says Shweta Kaushik, founder of SKID interior design studio in Mumbai, explaining why most fine-dining restaurants and premium bars prefer a darker ambience. “Low flickering amber lighting flatters everybody. Dim lighting makes people relax, they linger and lingering people will order a nightcap or a dessert they might otherwise skip.”

Maybe, but I’d add a caveat: only if they can read the text on the menu to order those extras.

“With dim lighting the restaurants attempt to give the space an elevated vibe,” says Minnie Bhatt, the designer behind Burma Burma, Ishaara and One8 Commune. While this mood setting is appreciated, the vibe can change when one has to switch on the smartphone torch to read the menu.

There’s an entire Facebook thread on “how to read menus at restaurants with low vision”. The hacks people have shared include checking the menu in advance on a phone or laptop, and using a hand-held Ruby magnifier device that reads the menu out loud. I too have taken pictures of the menu on my phone and zoomed in to read it more clearly. But does an evening of dining out require this level of planning?

“Not being able to read a menu is a real problem, but one that is easily solved. In the spaces we design, we create a layered hierarchical lighting scheme: a warm ambient wash which sets the mood and then subtle soft pools of light over each table just enough to allow you to read a menu,” says Kaushik, who has designed Woodside Inn’s Bandra outlet, 8ish and Sixteen33 in Mumbai among other restaurants and bars.

Restaurants are aware that too-low lighting can be a problem. “Apart from providing table top lights that are sufficient to read the menu, we also keep reading glasses for our guests who forget to carry them,” says Ankit Gupta, the co-founder of Burma Burma.

Solutions do exist within the principles of good design and yet many restaurants and decorators continue to overlook it in the name of creating an experience. If diners must deploy phone torches or magnifiers to read the menu, maybe the ambience is not cosy anymore. Ambience matters, but the mood lighting shouldn’t leave diners in the dark.