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Loud Enough for You?

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MAYBE IT WAS the beautiful warm weather, but on our trip to Paris in late spring, the Parisians seemed, well, sunny. They were amazingly nice, tres gentile, even smiling. Oddly, it was our little group of Americans who received the quizzical frowns and sideways glances in almost every restaurant and bistro we entered. We were the rude ones, and it took us awhile to catch on and shape up.

There were seven of us: six well-educated, well-traveled ladies (five San Diegans and one Georgian) and Le Professeur Charles Brown, our French teacher. We were there to see the sights and overcome our fear of speaking French in Paris. That part was easy. At a certain age, you don’t really care what a Parisian shopkeeper thinks of your accent. It was speaking English that raised eyebrows. We were loud, you see. Not loud by American standards, but loud for almost anywhere in France. Or the rest of Europe, for that matter.

Polly Platt writes in her book French or Foe? that in public the French speak to each other in low, intimate tones. She’s not kidding. In the fabulous (and ridiculously expensive) restaurant at the Musée du quai Branly, we were seated next to a large table of 12 well-dressed French men and women, probably executives. They ate, laughed, poured wine for each other and talked with great animation in the 90-degree heat (the place is all glass), but we heard not a word. People using American Sign Language make more noise. At our table, on the other hand, we had to start shushing each other after one glass of wine as our voices rose with the bonhomie and we quickly became the loudest table in the room. When my dessert, listed on the menu with Gallic understatement as a macaroon, arrived, it proved to be a pretty little filled cake topped with a swirly, spiky globe of spun sugar sitting there like a Paris hat. I quite naturally exclaimed, “Oh my God!” Heads turned.

One night, fed up with haute cuisine, we went for pizza to Les Halles, now a lively area crowded with many cafés. There were lots of young people spilling out onto the sidewalks, enjoying wine or beer with their food and conversation and having a good time in the balmy eve­ning. And which group made the most noise? Which one got the glances from college-age kids, who knew how to behave? Right.

It happened everywhere, from Les Deux Magots to the corner café. But behavior can be learned, and we slowly managed to put a lid on our collective volume output. At our last meal in Paris, at the wonderful El Mansour in the ritzy Eighth Arrondissement, I was relieved that we finally seemed to get the hang of keeping our voices down. But it didn’t matter. The maître d’ had seated us on the far side of the restaurant, well away from the rest of the diners. Smart.

This entire experience, capped off with a dinner next to a really loud foursome in Del Mar the night I arrived home, made me realize how very loud we are and how rare it is to find a café or restaurant in San Diego where one can hold a conversation without yelling. Any number of venues seem quite willing to deafen us all: Jake’s in Del Mar, Arterra in Carmel Valley on a Friday night or the Little Italy branch of Karen Krasne’s Extraordinary Desserts. A group of us met for lunch at Extraordinary Desserts one Saturday for a reunion, of sorts. By 1 o’clock, the entire place was filled, mostly with wom­en. The sound of female voices ricocheted off those high concrete walls like BBs in a bathtub, and nobody—nobody—could hear anything at all. This is one experience you can’t get in Europe.

I’m convinced most restaurants in San Diego—and probably in the rest of the United States—are loud: the Fish Market, California Pizza Kitchen, Piatti, P.F. Chang’s, Buca di Beppo, to name just a few of the more obvious. The question is: Why? Are Americans just naturally noisy? Have we been programmed to think noise means fun—that we’re not having a good time if we’re not hollering at each other through the din? Do we think being able to hear and think and talk while we eat means we’re dull and decrepit? Do we like loud rooms because they allow us to whoop with delight and shriek with laughter so you’ll think we’re having a much more fabulous time than you are? Or have we come to believe that having dinner surrounded by explosive noise is acceptable? Well, yes. Some of all of that, I think.

All of this racket causes us to make more of it, just so we can be heard over the racket we’re making. I would love to believe we will eventually work ourselves out of this sound spiral and begin to pipe down. And I’m sure this will happen—just about the time UCSD wins the Rose Bowl. In the meantime, though, I’m going to lower my voice and stay out of restaurants that are loud­er than a Lakers game. 

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