Eating dinner in pitch black at the Black Café on Maoming Road South in Shanghai is actually an illuminating, intimate and amusing sensory experience. Your sense of taste, smell, touch and hearing are all heightened, and you gain a greater appreciation of the sense of sight. It’s also a lot of fun. 

The owner, Ms Century Xie, was inspired to open Black Café when she worked in a similar “blind” restaurant in France. This is the first one in Shanghai. A mea there really helps you to realize the importance of visual clues in defining your world and how difficult it is for unsighted people to manage simple, essential tasks that we take for granted - like eating. 

You have to search for your dinner using only your hands, nose and mouth (hearing helps as well), which gives you a unique experience of touching, smelling and tasting your food. Cutlery is provided.  

The restaurant has two floors; the upstairs is in total darkness and the downstairs is dimly lit with deep pink-colored lights. On offer is an Italian set menu, with dishes ranging in price from RMB168 to RMB238, including salads, soups, main courses and desserts.  

You order the food downstairs and place all your belongings and light-emitting accessories including mobile phones in a locker to ensure you and other diners are all kept in absolute darkness. It also protects them from the mess you may make as you grope your way through the meal. If you don’t want to eat in the dark, you can also dine in the chic downstairs area, elegant with a black and glass finish. 

Upstairs, all the waiters and waitresses are blind, or to use the more politically correct term, unsighted. As you enter, you place your hands on their shoulders and they lead you to your table. The experience is highly amusing: sometimes you cannot find your food; you spill things on your clothes, or you try to cut a steak with the dull side of the knife.  

There is a mystery set menu and its dishes and prices vary by the day, so if you choose this, sometimes you only find out what you’ve eaten when you check the bill downstairs in the light. The creative “mystery” food is prepared in such a way that you really must use your senses of taste and smell. Chefs prepare the confusing food so that fish, meat and other things don’t have their usual shape and consistency. Food shaped like a prawn might actually be pork.   

Black Café is great fun and good for couples or groups of friends looking for a different night out. Some guests say they communicate more freely and intimately in the dark, and some men have proposed marriage to their sweethearts in the Black Café. Be careful you don’t gossip about anyone by name, though: they might just be sitting at the next table …