Formaggio Grill / The instant it goes on, I start panicking. I focus on taking deep breaths while also not stepping on the heels of the person in front of me as we’re led to our seats in a blind conga line. As dinner begins, I alternate between enjoying a guessing game of “what’s on my plate” and pure terror.

By the end of the dinner, I’m falling asleep because my eyes are closed against the blindfold. That, and the wine pours were pretty generous. If it’s true that we eat first with our eyes, what happens when we’re deprived of sight? Apparently, I freak out and get sleepy.

This is the latest experiment at Kailua’s Formaggio Grill: Dining in the Dark. With the silk, padded blindfolds Formaggio provides, vision is blacked out entirely “so that [guests] can experience dining through their other senses more intensely,” says restaurant manager Dusty Grable. “So they can taste more intensely, smell better…they can focus in on their other senses.”

That doesn’t exactly happen for my dining companions and me. Instead, we spend more time clutching our wineglasses for fear of losing them on the table or tipping them over, fretting that we look like idiots with bras over our eyes and taking stabs in the dark, determined to clean our plates even if we can’t see them. Dining in the Dark has brought our neuroses to light.

The background

It’s all a fun idea in theory. According to Grable’s research, dining blind started in Europe and made its way to U.S. restaurants, where sometimes blindfolds were used, sometimes the rooms were pitch black and servers wore night-vision goggles, and in some instances, diners were served by a legally blind wait staff.

“[Our goal] is to provide a new type of dining experience for adventurous diners, for adventurous foodies,” says Grable. “People do have to trust us because they go into the dinner not knowing what the dinner is going to be.” The four-course dinner with wine pairings changes every week. “Chef Jesse Cruz and I…keep in mind textures, temperatures, flavors, aromas while trying to create a gourmet menu, not just a gimmicky one. One that guests feel like they really get an incredible dining experience, from popcorn-crusted lobster tail to beef Wellington.”

In short, not so different from a normal menu development. Over four courses plus an amuse-bouche, we’re at times enveloped in the perfumes of parmesan cheese and black truffles. We enjoy the popping of green peas in our mouths and the smooth slipperiness of pearl onions (though round, rolling ingredients are difficult to corral on the plate). Scallops and gnocchi, similar in shape, size and texture, are fun to eat. The bucatini, a thick spaghetti with a hole in the middle that whistles slightly as we slurp it, is entertaining. Our favorite of the night is an affogato–a scoop of vanilla ice cream in espresso–icy and warm, bitter and sweet at the same time. But for the most part, the novelty of the dinner isn’t in what’s served, but the overall experience of dining in the dark.

There are unique challenges to creating a menu for blindfolded guests.

“We have to make sure that there are no bones, shells, stems,” Grable says. “Everything on the plate is edible. We want to make it challenging so that there is a little bit of adventure in dining, without it being frustrating. We don’t necessarily cut it into bite-sized pieces, but we’ll go with Wagyu short ribs as opposed to a ribeye steak, [which] may not be easy to cut into bite-sized portions if you’re blindfolded. Also… we don’t want to serve anything too hot. We want to make sure it’s the right temperature for enjoyment, but we don’t want guests to be in any harm in any way.”

Trust and safety? If Dining in the Dark sounds like other amorous activities that sometimes involve blindfolds, well, it is. Grable calls the night a “romantic dining experience.” Dining in the Dark gets a lot of reservations for first dates and couples, who “get touchy, and they like to kiss, blindfolded, trying to find each other’s lips,” he says. “We have had some guests be very sensual. You’re completely in the dark, there’s this romantic music, and you forget there might be someone standing there listening to your conversation.”

Not us. We’re acutely aware. Whether it’s because I’ve crashed my friends’ romantic date or because they can’t see who’s around them–apparently, their idea of romance is talking smack about people–after a few amorous attempts to find each other in the dark (“baby, that’s not me”), romance dissolves into giggling. But then, I’m blindfolded. For all I know they eventually started going at it while I stared obliviously into blackness.

In the end, it’s a fun adventure, and troubles that we expected–finding our mouths with our fork, knocking over wine glasses–do not surface. At the conclusion of dinner, however, when we’re no longer in the dark and are told what we ate, whether it’s psychology or the food itself, the menu sounds better than it tasted. There are all kinds of experiments we could conduct on the influence of sight and expectation on taste. But in the meantime, this might be my last leap into the dark for a while.

305 Hahani St., Kailua

Mon–Thu 11:30am–11pm, Fri & Sat 11:30am–1am, Sun 11am–11pm

[formaggio808.com], 263-2633