At the pitch-black Dunkelrestaurant everyone's on a blind date-literally

To commemorate my last night in Berlin, a friend took me out to the Dunkelrestaurant, which means the "dark restaurant". He didn't tell me much about the restaurant except that he had read about it a few months earlier before coming to Germany and it remained on his list of things to do before he left. Other cosmopolitan cities around the world, including Vancouver, have similarly themed restaurants but this was the birthplace from which others multiplied. The concept: we would be dining in the dark. No candlelight, no windows, no exit signs, no cigarettes, no cellphones, BlackBerries, pagers, cameras, or even watches. Not a wave of light was to shimmer in that dining room.

I had just spent two weeks in Berlin, viewing murals along the Berlin Wall, attending concerts in Sanssouci Park in Potsdam, and generally eating and shopping my way through the city, from Prenzlauer Berg where I noshed at the hippest (and smallest) techno- fusion café that had just sprung up, to Mitte where I shopped along the adorable boutique-lined Sophienstrasse, to Unter den Linden ("under the linden trees") where I strolled under the trees and through the Brandenburg Gate. It was a lovely introduction to a richly coloured city, but because I was staying in an apartment with Vancouverites-turned-locals, I also had an insider's perspective on the city that went far beneath the veneer of touristy perfection.

After being nearly destroyed during the Second World War, Berlin has made some incredible and beautiful repairs to its face. But under the skin lies a system still fraught with unresolved problems and unreconciled angst. Far from the tourist attractions, I saw bars full of unemployed men drinking the morning away because there was nothing else to do; I heard laments about families that had been evicted from their homes in the former East after the wall came down, when westerners rushed in and repossessed properties they claimed-truthfully or not-to have abandoned prior to the war; I was told about how the social system was generous enough to offer vacation pay to those fortunate enough to be on unemployment insurance but not broad enough to encompass a health-care system equitable to everyone. The old and the new seemed to clash more than complement one another, and I felt as though the rush to modernize and "fix" Berlin left some struggling in its wake.

I was one of them. True enough, I revelled in my fair share of Berlin's postcard perfection, but that came at uneven intervals and after much work. As a legally blind traveller, I found Berlin more frustrating than exhilarating. Given all the postwar repairs Berlin had to realize, I do understand that its priorities lent themselves toward larger, income-generating, and more diplomatic projects. But after many missed buses and stumbles along grossly cracked pavements, I had to wonder how a society that could build such beautiful palaces and monumental edifices could not somehow manage to get its pedestrian signals working properly. This was a city for the young, fit, and able-bodied. Like the unemployed men passing time in bars and the still-strained relations between "easterners" and "westerners", I felt displaced and at times, unwanted.

After two weeks of personal injustices, I was ready to move on. But if Berlin had one redeeming quality, it was its profusion of eateries for the gourmet to the gourmand. From vegetarian cafés to curry-wurst kiosks to haute-cuisine restaurants, Berlin catered to a variety of palates. And at the Dunkelrestaurant, it challenged the senses.

After entering the restaurant, we were seated in the lounge area and offered menus. The selections were intriguing: should I start with "prelude in bordeaux red" or "tipsy green elatedly dances through the night"? The entire menu was presented as wisps of poetry, evocative of sensations and pleasures, if not of the food itself. Which main course did I prefer: "the rabbit's young nephew enjoys bathing in a lake of legumes" or "he roars from the forest and passionately tangles up in its roots"? Hmmm, both sounded delicious to the ear. Thus began our transition from a visually dependent world into…my world.

After we placed our food and drink orders, our server introduced himself to us and asked us to follow him. We walked in single file, with one hand on the shoulder in front of us, from the reception area into a dim corridor. We walked a few more paces and then turned another corner into an even darker hallway. Our steps turned into shuffles and my friend's hand, at first light on my shoulder, started to grip me with talon force. We turned a few more corners and ended up in a large room completely devoid of light.

Our waiter led us to our table and had my friend wait while he seated me first and gently led my hands over the place setting so I knew where everything was. Then he turned to my friend and repeated the process. He announced that he would return shortly with drinks. We marvelled at the soft and steady pitter-patter of his footsteps, nowhere near as clumsy as our own shuffles just minutes earlier. He returned and deftly placed our drinks at the 2 o'clock position at our respective place settings. He then quietly said he would check on our first courses and, once again, stealthily slipped away.

In any other environment, it would be our waiter stumbling about, as I did two weeks prior, but here, he ruled. He was blind, and his lack of sight, in the dark, gave him the best vision in the house. All the servers and wait staff at Dunkelrestaurant are blind or legally blind.

As my companion and I sat at our table and absorbed the surroundings, I grew more and more liberated in this amazing setting where I could-finally!-not worry about my own lack of vision causing me grief or embarrassment over dining faux pas. I didn't worry about picking up the wrong utensil, measuring out the salt in my hand before sprinkling it on my food, or even closing my eyes to relieve the strain of just trying to see. I loved it.

My companion hated it-at first, anyway. As I was settling into a glowing sort of revelry, he was discovering a heightened sense of anxiety. Completely devoid of visual markers, he said he was beginning to feel claustrophobic and had to close his eyes to signal his body that it was okay to see nothing. He also kept asking, "Where are you? Where are you?" and despite my repeated assurances of "I'm right here!" I had to extend my hand across the table for him to hold. He needed the physical touch to anchor his place in the black hole that was the dining room.

Once he became accustomed, he asked, "Are you higher?" I laughed and assured him I was most definitely not higher, but he insisted that my seat must be higher than his. I reminded him that, at standing height, he was nearly a foot taller than I am and he was used to hearing my voice at the height of his shoulder. Seated, however, our voices were level. He had just never noticed that before in all our previous meals.

Our salads arrived and we began eating-sloppily. Our forks sometimes pierced very large pieces of salad greens that would slap our cheeks with globs of dressing, or they would pierce nothing at all, leaving our mouths gaping at an empty fork. We ended up eating the salad with our fingers, which only added to the sensory experience. Having freely forfeited our vision for one night, we ventured forward with gusto and glee in our multisensory consumption of our meals, tasting, smelling, touching, and listening to our food in a way that could never compare to merely seeing it.

By the time we were being led one final time by our waiter, my opinion of Berlin had changed completely. Regardless of whatever solidarity I may have felt with the servers at the Dunkel, I admired the restaurant's ability to embrace a concept so wildly improbable and then elevate it, and its staff, to heights of edgy modernity. Only a city truly comfortable with change and wholly accepting of all its facets could pull that off.

ACCESS: KLM, Northwest, Air Canada, British Airways, and Lufthansa can each get you to Berlin and back via various American and European hubs. If you have the time and the inclination, get yourself to London (it's easier to get a cheap ticket to London) and from there, check out one of the hundreds of bucket shops that sell discount tickets. You can find these, to a degree, on-line as well. When my friend in Berlin was preparing to return to Canada, he got his ticket, Berlin to London, for €0.01. Yes, really.

The Dunkelrestaurant is located at Gormannstrasse 14, in Berlin's Mitte district (www.dunkel-restaurant .com/). It's best to make reservations in advance ([49-30] 2434-2500), as it's a popular place for group dinners and (really) blind dates. Table d'hôte meals are available to accommodate a variety of tastes, ranging from vegetarian to fish to poultry to red meat. When you leave the restaurant, you can request a "plain" menu to decipher what you just ate.