Booking a table for two at Tao Downtown, I hesitated when I got to the box asking whether I had a special request. I did, but I wasn’t sure how it would go down. Would I be the first customer in history to ask for a noisy table?
This is not a normal ask, but I had my reasons. Recently I’d been trying to find out whether the way to hear and be heard in a dining room filled with booming speakers and screaming diners might be as simple as wearing a pair of earbuds. To put it to the test, I needed something I usually try to avoid: a hellishly loud restaurant.
As you may have heard, Apple announced last month that it would soon introduce new software enabling its AirPods Pro 2 earbuds to act as over-the-counter hearing aids for mild to moderate hearing loss, adjustable to your own ears. (You will be able take a simple exam from Apple on your device, or upload the findings of one given by an audiologist.)
What you may not know is that the AirPods Pro 2 already come with a setting that can turn up the volume on the voices of people you’re talking to and another one that tamps down background noise. Other earbud makers, including Sony, Samsung, Beyerdynamic and Soundcore, also offer functions meant to make conversation easier in noisy places. AirPods outsell them all, though, which is why I wore a pair to Tao and several other Manhattan restaurants known to wreak mayhem on the eardrums.
Over my 12 years as a restaurant critic, few problems I wrote about drew as many emails and comments as noise, and no issue came anywhere close to sparking as much white-hot rage. When I admitted that I like loud restaurants, up to a point, many readers were angry with me. They were even angrier with restaurants.
I get it. Long exposures to loud noise can cause hearing damage. Even at less brutal volumes, not being able to hear the other people at the table is maddening. Not being heard — having to repeat yourself and raise your voice until you sound as if you’re in a screaming match — is worse. All this is more punishing for people with any amount of hearing loss. Drowning in an angry sea of background noise, most of us finally give in to helplessness. We seethe, silently.