Dark dinner

Well that was a fascinating evening! My lovely daughter's inspired present for my recent birthday was to book us in for dinner at Dans le Noir in Farringdon, London. At this extraordinary restaurant you dine in complete darkness, guided to your table and then served throughout the meal by a blind waiter. Darren, our waiter, has been blind from birth, and the idea behind this surreal dining experience is to briefly live in his world, while enjoying your food entirely through taste with none of the other usual sensory cues that most of us are lucky to enjoy.

It is rather disorientating, especially as you select a menu on the basis of 'meat' ,' fish' , 'vegetarian' or 'surprise', with no forewarning of what you are about to eat. All is revealed after you exit the darkness at the end of the meal.

We had a fantastic, intense, odd, delicious, mind-warping time. You can hear other diners nearby, but you can't see a thing, just inky blackness all around. Apparently William and Kate have dined there. It must be one of the very few places in Britain where they could be completely incognito!

"Under cover of darkness, texture and shape take on new importance. Pretensions, etiquette and vanity dissolve in the darkness." Quote from the original Dans Le Noir restaurant in Paris.

What did we eat tonight? I'm not telling, for fear of spoiling the surprise if you ever go there. Suffice to say that we recognised some of what we were eating, but by no means all ...

Of course, I couldn't take a photo inside the restaurant (all your valuables, including mobiles phones, are stored in a locker before you go into the dining room). So here's the fizz we enjoyed before heading into the darkness.