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"  BOOMFH-BOOMFH-BOOMFH! The trouble with having music BOOMFH-BOOMFH-BOOMFH! in restaurants these days BOOMFH-BOOMFH-BOOMFH! is that you can&amp;#039;t even BOOMFH-BOOMFH-BOOMFH! hear the music if you wanted to. BOOMFH-BOOMFH-BOOMFH!  Hold on, lemme turn this crap off.  Ahhh. Okay. That&amp;#039;s much better -- my molars are no longer shaking loose. As I was saying, the trouble with music in restaurants is that they play the stuff so damn loud that it creates an utterly ironic, extremely unpleasant conundrum -- people have to talk louder and louder to be heard, which forces them to focus extremely hard on what&amp;#039;s being said, thereby blocking out any possibility of hearing the gawd-awful European electronica they&amp;#039;re blaring on the speakers.  All of which begs the question: Why do it in the first place?  Many restaurateurs pump up the sound to &amp;quot;maintain the energy.&amp;quot; They&amp;#039;re terrified that there might be a millisecond of silence in a room full of one-hundred-and-fifty guests shouting across the table from each other. Restaurateur Jeremiah Tower once said that the only thing worse than a loud restaurant is a quiet one, but somewhere in between is the norm for most restaurants anyway, unless it&amp;#039;s one of those funereal three-star restaurants in Europe where you can hear a souffl\u00E9 fall and where diners whisper, &amp;quot;Could you please pass the salt?&amp;quot; So when American restaurateurs insist that they must have loud music simply because people expect it and because the designer gets a cut of the sound system bill, I ask them to tell me their own five favorite restaurants in the world.  Invariably they answer with a selection of haute cuisine dining rooms, a favorite bistro, a sushi bar in Tokyo, a trattoria in Umbria, and a dim sum parlor in Chinatown. Then I ask them, &amp;quot;Do any of them have music?&amp;quot; There is a pause. The fellow thinks and thinks hard, then shrugs, and, with the look of a man who has no intention of changing his mind on the subject anyway, says, &amp;quot;Uh, no. They don&amp;#039;t.&amp;quot;  And yet restaurants continue to pump in the &amp;quot;mood music,&amp;quot; which invariably comes in one of three varieties: Bass-heavy techno with names like &amp;quot;Eine kleine Schmetterlings-Hommage,&amp;quot; New Age guitar with titles like &amp;quot;Aspen at Midnight,&amp;quot; or classical strings (with a 95 percent chance you&amp;#039;ll hear Vivaldi&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;Four Seasons&amp;quot; at some point). For a couple of years there you couldn&amp;#039;t eat dinner without having to listen to Andrea Bocelli and Sarah Brightman belting out &amp;quot;Time to Say Goodbye.&amp;quot; Sadly, Ottmar Libert, Kenny G, The Gypsy Kings, and Nora Jones continue to intrude.  Diners come to enjoy the monkfish with fennel sauce -- not the $50,000 speaker system. One can hardly be a sophisticated gastronome while Macy Gray pounds in your ears. Music is wholly unnecessary in a restaurant. The natural gregariousness of the clientele buoys the spirit far better than some overloud compilation of disco favorites.  This isn&amp;#039;t to say silence is always golden. Some music is nice. When I dine at home outside in summer, I play music I personally like at a level at which I can either ignore it or listen to it. And when dinner&amp;#039;s over and I&amp;#039;m having coffee, there&amp;#039;s nothing better than the romantic hush of Diana Krall&amp;#039;s voice and piano. But when I&amp;#039;m in a restaurant, let me enjoy the company of the people I&amp;#039;ve come to dine with -- and put a lid on it. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/food-drink/a3459/mariani092007/>