The armrest is well padded and warm to the touch. It is covered with a thin, loose sheet of fabric. I grasp it and explore it with my fingers only to discover it isn't an armrest but, rather, a shirt-sleeved arm.
"Excuse me!" I cry. "Entschuldigen Sie!" My neighbor laughs.
Rita, our waitress, might have warned us that we would be sharing a table with strangers when she first led us into this pitch dark dining room, but that surprise is part of the experience of eating at Blindekuh.
Open since 1999, Blindekuh (the name means "blind cow" and refers to the game "Blind Man's Bluff") was founded by a team of blind and partially sighted people who had previously worked as exhibition guides at the Zurich installation of "Dialogue in the Dark." It has both inspired a number of other dark restaurants throughout the world and maintained a reputation as being a pretty good place to eat.
My wife, 14-year-old daughter and I make reservations for dinner for our first night in Switzerland and arrive jet-lagged, not yet hungry, but game.
The evening begins in an entrance foyer where the menu — three appetizers, three entrees, three desserts — is (subtle irony) projected onto a wall. We're advised to leave our coats and bags in lockers.
Once we're ready, the host calls Rita, who emerges from behind a black curtain.
"Hallo! I am Rita!" she says merrily. She is a woman in her late 50's, with curly gray hair and sunken eye sockets. Her eyelids stay open a crack to reveal slits of unseeing white.
"You are ready, ja?" Rita asks. "Put your hands on my shoulders so." We follow her in a Conga Line through a double set of thick curtains into the dining room. It is so dark I can't see my hand in front of my face.
As we walk past tables, I smell the food — fish and meat, yes, but more that vague oniony-buttery smell of European cooking. Sauces. I smell sauces.
"You stay here please," Rita says kindly, as she helps each of us to our chairs and that awkward moment in the evening where, as my wife and daughter are effortlessly taking their seats, I'm feeling up my neighbor. Entschuldigen Sie!
Rita walks us through the menu choices and reminds us to call her name loudly if we need anything.
In Rita's absence, we are left to make Interesting Observation #1: While I find myself intensely attuned to the smells in the room, my wife zeroes in on the noises.
"I feel like I can hear every conversation at every table," she marvels. This difference seems consistent with our personalities.
"Hallo! This is Rita!" says our stealth server, suddenly at our side. "Your wine is on the right side of your water glass." I gingerly feel through the place setting until my hand closes around a sturdy goblet, and I take a few grateful sips.
In a flash, Rita is back with our starters. I have a "mixed salad" — not the tossed salad I was expecting but rather little piles of julienned carrots, egg wedges, beets, lettuce in vinaigrette and something shredded that is both strange and familiar, like a friend's voice I haven't heard in years. Aha: celery root rémoulade. My wife was expecting baked artichoke but instead receives a salad of warmed avocado and shrimp — first distressing, then ravishingly good.
We make Interesting Observation #2: Great surprise + familiar taste = crazy delicious.
My wife passes her plate for a bite. I pour water from a carafe into everyone's glasses. My mischievous daughter displaces my wine glass and makes me go feeling for it.
We are having a blast, but still. We can all sense the darkness weighing on us, pushing down, belying the gay sounds of laughter and tinkling china. Life is good, and the void is close.
"Hallo! This is Rita!" she comes bearing plates of pike perch, which we all order. The smell nearly knocks me over. Fish, spinach and saffron, but something else. Something I know. The steamy smell of my mother's big saucepan ... the lid coming off ... rice. Converted rice. I'm smelling Uncle Ben.
My fork darts around the plate and lifts tasty bites of freshwater fish, slick spinach dripping with butter sauce and mounds of that rice. I quickly tire of the spinach and rice and soon begin using my fingers to extract the fish. My daughter informs me that she had been using her fingers all along.
Interesting Observation #3: People must be doing all sorts of things in this room that they wouldn't normally. Seriously. The staff must have stories.
As we are waiting for dessert and reeling a bit from the blackness and the jet lag, there is a brief flash of dim light from the kitchen. It's too quick for me, and I don't perceive anything. But my daughter does.
"Didn't you see it?" she demands, an edge in her voice. "There was, like, a counter. With plates on it! It was right behind us!"
My poor child seems to be having a Matrix moment. This strange world reveals itself for an instant, and it's not what she had envisioned. Just as the smells and noises seem magnified by the obscurity, so do the questions. Where are we? What lies just beyond?
For now we have only the darkness, and each other, and — "Hallo! This is Rita!" — ice cream.
Blindekuh: Mühlebachstrasse 148, Zurich. 044-421-50-50. www.blindekuh.ch/e/zurich/wayin.html
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