The Unique NYC Restaurant Where Everyone Gets Blindfolded
When you go out to a restaurant, you probably want an experience that elevates food to a level beyond what you can achieve in your kitchen. Even if you're a talented chef in your own right, there is almost certainly a style of cuisine that won't taste the same if you make it at home. A dish might involve a particularly technical preparation style, or it could be made with a slew of spices and secrets particular to a specific culture to which you simply aren't privy.
However, restaurants have the ability to enhance their meals by changing the atmosphere for patrons. This can lead to some pretty wild dining experiences. Two of the most bizarre restaurants in the world are the Ithaa Undersea Restaurant in the Maldives, where you dine under an acrylic dome while sea creatures swim above, and New Zealand's Redwoods Treehouse, a beautiful wooden structure built among Warkworth's towering Redwood trees (via Reader's Digest). Dinner in the Sky, where you eat your dinner while strapped to a table that is lifted 160 feet high by a crane, is another unique culinary experience you can have at various locations. In New York City, there's a restaurant that is sure to shock your senses.
Dining in the Dark at Abigail's Kitchen
Dining in the Dark, which you can experience at several restaurants around the world, seeks to elevate your dining experience by stripping away one of your most essential senses — sight. The website explains, "After donning your blindfold in the darkened, candlelit room, you'll soon realize that focusing on taste and smell alone can be a truly enlightening experience—provided you're not afraid of the dark!" Your dinner in the dark will feature a secret menu that is only revealed after you've finished eating.
Restaurant Clicks explains that you could enjoy a blindfolded dinner in New York City at Abigail's Kitchen. According to the official Abigail's Kitchen Facebook page, the restaurant was formerly called Camaje Bistro. It reopened in 2020 as Abigail's Kitchen, named after its owner, per the restaurant's official website. Abigail's Kitchen hosts dinners in the dark biweekly and for special occasions like Valentine's Day.
The science of eyeless eating
Visuals play an important role in any dining experience. Chef David Burke's plating practices involve centering a dish on the plate and utilizing a variety of colors and dimensions. These artistic choices aren't just appealing to the eye –- they can also please your palate. The Los Angeles Times cites a study carried out by the Crossmodal Research Laboratory at the University of Oxford, which found that participants who ate a salad styled after Wassily Kandinsky's "Painting Number 201" enjoyed the dish more than those who ate a less artistic salad comprised of the same ingredients.
It stands to reason that dining in the dark would represent the ultimate test of our visual appetites. A study published in Food Quality and Preference, which had two groups of participants (one blindfolded, one not) eat ice cream, found that the people who ate their dessert blindfolded were nearly 10% less likely to want to eat the same ice cream in the future (via ScienceDirect). Stanford University's Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute explains when someone loses one of their senses, the others can be heightened as the brain attempts to compensate for the missing stimuli. This suggests that eating a meal while blindfolded makes people more critical of its flavor. At a high-quality restaurant like Abigail's Kitchen, the carefully crafted dishes could be better appreciated in a dining-in-the-dark setting.