I remember a dinner at Marc Vetri’s Osteria where we were seated in a separate room from the main dining room. The only source of lighting were candles on the tables.
Every. Single. Table had their phones out in order to decipher the menu, or to see what food items had been delivered.
Meh.
Years back, I remember having dinner at one of the restaurants at the Colonial Williamsburg “museum”. Only candles there for lighting but, of course, it was in the historical context of the place.
Alright - showing my age here . . . but not a fan of the super dark dining rooms. But dislike it even more when the restaurant then chooses to print their menu with stupid little fonts that are hard to read even in full light - or - print their little thin italic fonts in, say, brown ink on a brown paper. It just gets stupid IMHO.
Two words: reading glasses.
I deluded myself for well over a year claiming the reason I could no longer decipher the cocktail menu at our favorite watering hole was the small font & bad lighting while borrowing my dude’s readers.
Turns out… it was my deteriorating eyeballz the entire time!
Why, lousy!!!
I’ve worn glasses since I was 5, and my super-strong progressive lenses are often of no use in lousy lighting.
Yep.
I’ve worn glasses since third grade (now contacts).
Obviously, lighting is important as well.
I am of an age that I carry ‘cheaters’ with me almost all the time, but if a restaurant has the poor combination of low lighting and small (or nearly illegible) menu fonts that I have to struggle to read their menu, I probably would not return.
Yes, we found the experience at Osteria so off-putting we never went back — not to mention the weird-ass security dudes in brightly colored security dude sports coats, complete with ear pieces 
— although I suppose we could insist being seated in the very well-lit main dining room.
Haven’t had better chicken liver riggies or better pork loin anywhere else, ever.
100% need glasses to read the menu nowadays even in good lighting. In the dark places I wonder about the efforts in the kitchen made to make the food look pretty. Colors and garnishes and seared skin, and the dark washes all that detail out.
Went to a sandwich place that printed their menu robins egg blue italicized font on white. Small font and long menu descriptions. It’s like some people don’t think at all about the practicality of their design.
Funny, I got a save the date card today for a wedding later this year. Light pink on ivory card stock. So pretty, but so hard to read!
There’s a fine line between “romantically dim” and “did they pay the ConEd bill?”
I want to see what I’m eating, but I don’t want it bright like an operating room.
My family and I went out for a birthday meal last week, and the resto put a small battery light on the table for us. My niece looked at the waiter and said “we’re gonna need two more of these.”
We prefer romantically lit restaurants (not pitch black). Mrs. P has sensitive eyes, and cannot stand ‘interrogation room’ bright restaurants where you need sunglasses to dine. A lot of times Mrs. P has to ask a restaurant to dim their lights a little if it is way too bright. We won’t go back to a restaurant with very bright lights no matter how good the food is.
When we went to El Meson Sandwiches in San Juan, the only menu was on the board above the counter, and was written in spidery letters that were hard to read. Sandwiches with long, tiny descriptions were completely illegible to us, and they had no paper menus to give us either. We ended up asking them to read us the menu.
