The Rat Pack vs. the Kids in the Kitchen: Are Those Our Only Choices?

It was a more important anniversary than most so we decided to splurge on a local restaurant that always gives me buyer's remorse when I get the check.

My wife and I are both getting up in years and we eat out at what she used to jokingly refer to as "blue hair hours," when you can get the early-bird special if you want. In that time slot the crowd consists of senior citizen guys and their wives, who in some cases anticipated the current trend in weird hair colors with what is known in the beauty trade as a "blue rinse," a hair dye used to enhance the appearance of white hair. Where once we laughed at them, we now dine with the blue hairs.

As we settled into our seats we were greeted not with the quiet tinklings of piano bar music one would once have expected to hear in such a refined (and high-priced) setting, but a full blast of Prince's "Kiss."

Don't get me wrong; I yield to no man in my fondness for Prince's music. In 1984 I was probably the oldest person in attendance at the premiere of his movie Purple Rain in Boston. But, as it says in the Book of Ecclesiastes, there is a time for everything, and the time for Prince isn't 6 p.m. on a Saturday night in the suburbs.

I had never written a review on social media before, but I decided—what the hell. At $21 for a hamburger, the cheapest item on the menu, I was entitled. I kept my criticism civil, noting only that the people most likely to eat in the early evening were also the ones whose hearing has started to fade. I don't know about the other diners—maybe they'd already bought state-of-the-art hearing aids—but I had trouble hearing the waiter, the kid with the rolls and the breadsticks, and my wife, sitting right across the table. Didn't it make sense, I wrote, to have soft music playing then?

I made a few suggestions from my favorites—Oscar Peterson, Red Garland, Bill Evans—to point management in the right direction. Nothing too virtuosic like Art Tatum, or off-beat, like Thelonius Monk. If you have never posted on Yelp (which I used) or other business review websites, you should know that the owners have the opportunity to respond, and this one did.

"Thanks for your comments!" the reply began, as they typically do. "We tried that 'Rat Pack' music before, but people prefer rock." The Rat Pack—in case you didn't know— refers to several groups of self-appointed swingers, the most famous of which was comprised of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Peter Lawford, Sammy Davis, Jr. and Joey Bishop. To the extent that the tag is associated with a school of jazz, it would thus be of the sort you'd expect to hear from the house band at a Las Vegas casino—in the 1950s. The kind parodied by comedian Bill Murray with his "Nick the Lounge Singer" character on Saturday Night Live.

Having worked in several restaurants when I was younger, in positions ranging from busboy to waiter, I could make an educated guess as to the source of the problem. Wait staff and those in the "back of the house" (where food is cooked and dishes are washed) are invariably younger than the customers. When they begin their shift, they use their favorite music, played at loud volume, to get pumped up for the night ahead. You can understand the impulse, even if your days of working for the minimum wage plus tips are in the far-distant past.

This creates a perfect storm, to borrow the title of the Sebastian Junger book. Have you ever sat down in a restaurant and, before the hostess departed, said "Could you please turn the music up?" I doubt it.

You don't need to be Isaac Newton to know that an action as powerful as loud piped-in music would inspire an equal and opposite reaction. There is an organization called "Pipedown: The International Campaign for Freedom from Piped Music." It was founded by a man named Nigel Rogers after his evening out in a London bistro was spoiled because he and his companion "could not hear ourselves speak. Music blaring from every corner killed conversation." Before we burn the steak tips to a crisp over this issue—isn't there room for compromise? In Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night" Orsino calls music "the food of love," and a few pages from the Great American Songbook do wonders to fill those awkward moments when you've run out of things to say to your companion, and may even inspire you to new heights of eloquence a la Eddie Haskell in "Leave it to Beaver"—"That's a fetching outfit you have on Mrs. Cleaver!" Mood Media, the successor to Muzak, offers ten jazz programming playlists, including the "Rat Pack" option ("Classic Mature Jazz Vocals") the restaurant manager tried and found wanting.

One wonders why the industry doesn't do something about what Zagat, the restaurant review guide, says is the second most-common complaint of diners. Maybe the music's too loud for them to hear us.

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