A short while back I enjoyed a fine evening at an old-time San Francisco restaurant, Alfred's Steakhouse, tucked away on a side alley across the street from Portsmouth Square. Everything about Alfred's says yesteryear in Baghdad-By-The-Bay, from its Dashiell Hammett location to the former tenant of the space (The Blue Fox, a favorite hangout of SF Symphony music director Pierre Monteux), to its gloriously un-California-Cuisine menu, to its genial tuxedo'd waiters, to its red walls and thick plush booths.
Plus something even more valuable: you can hear yourself and your table companions at Alfred's. You don't even have to think in terms of "noise levels" given that it isn't really noise at all, just an overall hum of diners and the like doing their thing, but not that horrible raucous roar that can make dining out in San Francisco such an unpleasant chore. Alfred's was designed in the days when you gave people plenty of room at their tables and surrounded them with partitions and frosted glass. The room is plush with thick carpets, just the right environment for absorbing excess sound. The place isn't pestered with in-your-face canned music. Everything bespeaks attention to the individual, respect for people's privacy and space. Imagine that. In San Francisco.
I note that the restaurants I tend to enjoy the most have precisely the same kind of people-friendly, not overly loud atmosphere. Jardinière is another prime example of a restaurant that's designed to ensure that you can carry on a normal conversation with a dinner companion without requiring a bullhorn. Ditto Harris's out on Van Ness, another marvelously old-timey place with tufted plush booths and big tables and great steaks.
I recognize that all those restaurants share a somewhat older clientèle in common; maybe older folks just aren't willing to put up with cacophonous roaring. I'll agree that our hearing is less batlike than the denizens of GenY. But you'd think that noise would bother the youngsters more than it does us—after all, they can hear it all the better. But apparently they don't think it's worth kvetching about or else they associate blast-furnace noise levels with a jolly evening out. But I was a kid once, and I hated loud restaurants then, too. There weren't as many of them in those days, though.
Still, I wonder if it's about time that noise levels became a greater concern amongst restauranteurs. Provide people with a civilized environment instead of a screaming madhouse. Would those restaurant folk be able to resist the siren song of higher profits by jamming in the tables ever close and crowding people into a claustrophobic environment where the only way to be heard is to bellow? Consider the ultra-trendy high-end place less than a block away from my house. Always packed. Almost unbelievably noisy inside; just not anywhere near enough room for the sound to get out. As much as I enjoy a nice dinner in a fine restaurant, every time I pass the joint I shiver a bit: there's something hideously offputting about such a stuffed cattle car of a restaurant, no matter how expert the cuisine.