Restaurants deafen diners with music, GFG warns

The Good Food Guide 2018  once more includes information  about whether or not the place reviewed has music (though it does not specify what sort of music).

The GFG now reports that more and more establishments are alienating their customers by deafening them with ‘Glastonbury-force’ piped music.

This year’s guide, just published , warns of an ‘unprecedented trend for noisy restaurants, which is leading to a spike in complaints from sensitive eared customers….Restaurants are getting noisier – that’s what our readers, this year in unprecedented numbers, are telling us. Noise levels, already amplified by bare-bones design, are being raised by music played at Glastonbury force. Everyone loves a restaurant that has a buzzing, vibrant atmosphere, but it becomes exhausting and self-defeating when, as one old hand told us: ‘I have never heard such loudly amplified music in an eating place. It was so loud that I couldn’t hear a word the waitress was saying, and vice versa. We had to gesture and point.”

The recent very common trend for minimalist bare walls and floors, ‘not just in hipster places’, is also changing the acoustics in restaurants and making it difficult for people to hear each other.

Pipedown in collaboration with Action on Hearing Loss (aka RNID), is planning a fresh campaign to make restaurateurs far more aware of this problem.
 AHL has recently (20th September) relaunched its Speak Easy Campaign, encouraging diners to record noise levels with an app that can be downloaded onto a mobile.