When Chow opened in Vancouver last spring, the roar was almost deafening.
"We wanted the restaurant to have a lively feeling, a busy East Coast din," co-owner Mike Thomson says of the modern, industrial room with its polished cement floor, stark walls and flat, drywall ceiling. "Our architect warned us that we might have some sound problems, but we had no idea."
The acoustics were so bad, Mr. Thomson recalls walking into the empty restaurant, clapping his hands and hearing the echo ring three or four times.
"Can you imagine how loud it got when you had 50 people in there?" he asks.
Within a few months, Mr. Thomson had compiled a long list of would-be patrons who told him they loved the food but hated the noise - and didn't plan to return until he turned down the volume.
After poor service, noise has become the second most common complaint of restaurant goers in the United States, according to Zagat Survey's 2008 edition of America's Top Restaurants. In the most recent Zagat survey for Vancouver, noise ranked as the third most irritating aspect of dining out (after bad service and lacklustre food); in Montreal and Toronto, it placed fourth.
And as the racket continues to grow, diners are finally speaking up - over the clatter of silverware and booming background music - to voice their disapproval.
"It's become much worse over the last decade," says Marion Kane, a veteran food writer and broadcaster who believes some restaurateurs deliberately create a noisy environment.
"There is a mistaken belief - especially among young people - that if you're shouting and it's loud, you're having a good time."
Ms. Kane recalls a recent dinner where the babble was so intense, she started eating manically. "I was so nervous and wound up, I kept eating the food off my friend's plate. On the way home, I had to ask her stop the car so I could throw up."
At last year's Vancouver Magazine restaurant awards, the jury for the design award withheld the gold prize, in part because they saw, or heard, "so many pretty rooms bedevilled by sound problems."
Charlene Rooke, one of the jury members and editor-in-chief of Western Living magazine, says intolerance to noise is not just a generational issue.
"I'm not an old fogy - I'm not even 40," she says. "But if I'm eating in a fine-dining restaurant and paying X amount of dollars for dinner, I want to be able to hear the person across the table. I shouldn't have to yell."
So how loud is too loud?
The ideal sound level for normal conversation is 55 to 65 decibels. When the ambient noise rises to about 70 decibels, you have to raise your voice to be heard. At 75 decibels, conversation is difficult. Above 85 decibels, prolonged exposure - more than eight hours - can permanently damage your hearing.
While restaurant noise levels aren't a threat to hearing loss, "they are certainly an issue for communication. Many, if not most, restaurants have noise levels that are too high for comfortable conversation," says Christine Harrison, an occupational audiologist with the Workers Compensation Board of British Columbia.
Complicating the issue, most of the noise in restaurants comes from echo and reverberation, which isn't easy to measure. The quality of noise can also make a difference.
"If you go to a restaurant with carpets and soft chairs, the noise might be high, but it's deadened," says John Vrtacic, a sound engineer in the music industry who has worked with Metallica. "You may read 75 decibels on a noise meter, but it's not psychologically annoying. If you're in a restaurant with tiles on the floor and a lot of clinking, the frequencies are higher, and the noise is more annoying."
Add background music to the mix and the cacophony can be ear-shattering. Unfortunately, many restaurateurs aren't listening.
