The room is pitch black. There is absolutely no light in here, not even an emergency exit or the glow of a cell phone. I can't see anything. A slight panic flickers through my mind. For the next three hours, I will have to rely on my other senses to figure everything out.

I'm at Opaque, a fancy restaurant in San Francisco in which patrons dine in perfect darkness. Actually, I don't really know if it's fancy — the staff members are polite and the tablecloth feels expensive, but for all I know the room is a basement dungeon and my steak is green. In addition to offering a tasty five-course prix fixe menu, Opaque forces us to live without our vision for a few hours — most of us rely on the sense of sight heavily during our daily lives, and we don't really know what it's like to not be able to see at thing.

Mocha, our waitress, is legally blind. She has leber congenital amaurosis, a genetic retinal disease that causes her to see giant blotches of blind spots all across her field of vision — she can see basic shapes, but she can't read or drive. Having lived with this all her life, she's a pro at maneuvering through the darkness — once my date for the night, Julio, and I pick our food choices from a menu in a dimly lit lounge, she slips through a curtain and marches through the pitch darkness with my arm on her shoulder, forewarning me of a right turn ahead, then a slight left, until we reach the table.

Read the rest:An evening meal in total darkness at Opaque - Boing Boing

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