A Campaign Asks Spaniards to Be Less Noisy in Restaurants

Incredibly noisy restaurants—and I'm not talking convivial or bustling—can be irritating to the point of rage. As you strain to hear the person across from you over the shrieks and booming bro-ness—"This bone marrow is so bomb!"—you start to seethe and wonder, "Why the fuck are you screaming?" And then, "Am I turning into an old person?"

Some brave Spaniards, who know a thing or two about maddeningly loud dining in the late-night playgrounds of Barcelona and Madrid, have had enough and are taking a stand.

Oír Es Clave, a charity that works to improve the lives of people with hearing impairments, has started a campaign called "Comer sin ruido," or "Dine Quietly," to combat the cacophony.

"Without a doubt we have a problem with noise here in Spain," Svante Borjesson, the director of Oír es Clave, told The Local. "Spain is the noisiest country in the world after Japan."

Dine Quietly is offering advice to restaurants to fight the noise, suggesting that restaurants do things like padding chairs and chair feet, turning down the music or TV, separating tables, and asking noisy patrons to keep it down. Also, with the prevalence of café culture and a nightlife scene that often spills into the street, a big goal is to keep outside noise from coming into the restaurant. Maybe consider soundproof paneling, too.

Some bigwigs have gotten behind idea. The Madrid chef Ramón Freixa, with two Michelin stars and Relais and Château status, is on board. As he told the magazine Enfemenino, "Gastronomy is an experience of the senses, and noise can harm that pleasure."

Oír es Clave hopes that guides like Michelin, which can carry a lot of weight in people's minds and affect dining choices, consider noise level as a gradable variable. In 2013, a Zagat survey found that diners' number-one complaint nationally was noise. Think of taking visiting parents to a new restaurant—groaning about the sound level, or, perhaps, the lighting level, seems inevitable.

The prior year, The New York Times measured the decibel levels at many restaurants around town. Of the restaurants tested, many registered well into the nineties, louder than or as loud as lawnmowers (96 decibels), electric drills (94 decibels), and a C train traveling downtown in Manhattan (84 decibels). One beer garden registered 96 decibels without any music playing.

Exposure to decibel levels that high for an extended period of time can lead to hearing loss, and the federal government's Occupational Safety and Health Administration requires workers to wear hearing protection if they work for more than eight hours in environments where the noise level is above 90 decibels.

And while some restaurants spend tens of thousand of dollars and design their restaurants with noise reduction in mind, TheTimes made note of two studies that might lead a restaurant manager to turn up the volume. One noted that people tend to drink more when music is playing loudly, and another found that people chew faster when listening to music with a fast tempo. While cranking the music to encourage a party environment where people are likely to drink more seems plausible, throwing on some techno to encourage them to chew faster seems a bit more farfetched.

An army of shushers might not be the solution, but if Oír Es Clave can find a way to combat the deafening din found in many restaurants, it could feel like a win for civility. Just remember, it's not you—it really is loud in here. Especially if you're in Barcelona.