BUZZ OFF | July 9th 2008

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Stylish restaurants are notoriously noisy, which is all well and good unless you find your dining partner interesting. David Jenkins investigates the aesthetics of buzz in the dining room ...

What's the secret? "Carpet," says Rowley Leigh, chef and co?owner of Le Café Anglais, who spent 20 years as chef of Kensington Place. "Tablecloths. And the curtains probably do a bit. But carpet, mostly, and the decision to have tablecloths--both for the acoustics and a sense of luxe. In Paris you've got places like La Coupole, Balzar, the Vaudeville--all busy, but you can hear. And they've got plush velvet, high ceilings and tablecloths. But maybe you should talk to our architect."

I do, and Richard Blandy, of Stiff & Trevillion, says: "It's relatively straightforward. If you put a carpet in, it takes away any element of risk. The River Café's got a nice bright carpet, and Scott's..."

That sort of talk baffles Julyan Wickham, the architect who designed the notoriously noisy Kensington Place. "Getting rid of carpets on floors was a revolution. They get smelly, dirty and disgusting. Wet feet on carpets: horrible! That's the thing I find strange: why Rowley--who's a very good chef and a very good host--should go for something so old?fashioned."

When Wickham first put Kensington Place together in 1987, it was radical, and all hard surfaces: bare tables, bare chairs, wooden floor, wooden sails. It was, Leigh says, "A conspiracy of sounds. All that wood, and nothing soft."

Wickham says it was designed for Notting Hill as it then was--bohemian and youthful rather than bankerish and middle?aged. Even so, says Leigh, there were complaints about the noise from the start. But when Wickham offered to calm the noise down, Leigh demurred: "I was terrified we'd lose the atmosphere. An animated restaurant gets you going. The curse of the country restaurant is hush."

So buzz ruled. Tchaik Chassay, an architect responsible for some of London's zappiest venues, past and present (192 and the Groucho among them), summarises the theory and practice neatly: "It all started with the tiled Italian terrazzo restaurants of the 1960s--places like Alvaro's. And the great thing about buzzy restaurants is that they make customers compete to be heard. And the more they shout, the more oxygen they use, which in turn means they drink more. Which makes them shout even more and drink even more, so they leave the restaurant thinking they've had a really good time."

But loud restaurants, Chassay adds, can also offer more privacy; you can't hear what people are saying at the next table. Blandy concurs: "You get to the point where no one else can hear your conversation. That said, if you're paying a lot for a meal, you don't want to feel like you've gone to a rock concert."

This is the sort of problem David Collins, another leading restaurant designer, deals with all the time. "I'm thinking volume, surfaces, where I can use a texture on walls, tables, seats, how I can create a density that furnishes a nice sound."

At J. Sheekey, which he designed, there are plenty of hard surfaces, but the rooms are small, inn?like and upholstered; the effect is intimate. At Petrus, Collins has gone for a feeling of "luxury and texture". At the Wolseley, though, or Nobu Berkeley, he has aimed for the hubbub that quickens the heart, the sense that here is where the action is. At the Wolseley, he says, he is helped by the very high ceiling and the groin vaults in that ceiling. They absorb sound; they don't reflect it back. "It's the old physics, isn't it? Resonance and reverberation."

What else? Well, a timber floor, says Blandy, is better than a ceramic one, and ribbed timber (as used at the revamped Royal Festival Hall) better than timber tout court. You can make sure, too, that rooms don't have walls that are absolutely parallel; the more angles the better. If the ceiling is low--as say, at St Alban--you can adjust accordingly, says the acoustic engineer Anthony Herbert. "Put domes over a table. The effect is not as definite as a cocoon, but it will reduce spillage out of the area." (Something Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair, might do well to think about at his ultra?fashionable New York restaurant, the Waverley Inn. The ceiling is low, low, low, and when I last ate there, little could be heard apart from one tv star's orgasmic laughter.)

The hard-surfaces problem did not obtain in the more tranquil era Nicky Haslam remembers: "Back in the 1950s, it was all red plush and gilt cherubs, like the old Caprice. Heaven! Bring it back."

That's not for David Collins. He knows all about the use of drapes, curtains, swags and so on. "But the issue is that they don't work with contemporary restaurant design. So the challenge is, how to make things audible without them."

Le Café Anglais has ducked that challenge; it has taken the easy?listening way out. But it is both quiet and glamorous, like the dining room on a great ocean liner of the deco years. It's not that you can't hear a pin drop, just that you can share a joke with a table of six rather than fail to get it heard by an audience of one.

Which is not to say that inaudibility is always a bad thing. "I adore loud restaurants," says Charles Brand, a senior television executive. "They're where I take the boring people who I can't bear listening to."

(David Jenkins is a consultant editor of the First Post, an online magazine. He also writes for the Sunday Telegraph, Vogue and the Guardian.)