Recently I was dining in a newly-opened restaurant in Sydney’s CBD – one that’s bathed in racy but impractical red light – and found myself glaring, peering, squinting and blinking at the menu for a solid minute before giving up and asking someone else to tell me what was on it. They managed with the help of an iPhone flashlight.

On another occasion while dining in regional NSW, the restaurant I was in was so dark that I had to wave the candle on the table up to the paper menu to read it. I’m lucky I didn’t kick off the 2025 fire season.

I had my eyes tested a couple of years ago and they were in rude good health so I don’t think I need to get to Specsavers. I think I was being thwacked – yet again – by the current curse of terrible restaurant lighting.

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Turns out I’m not seeing things (literally). Restaurants are getting darker, at least according to the experts.

“In general I think people are trying to create moodier, intimate environments,” says Hayley Mitchell, principal at Mitchell & Eades, the design firm responsible for several restaurant interiors including the very well-lit Batard in Melbourne and the upcoming Grill Americano in Sydney. She thinks that lower lighting can feel “like a big hug”. “The more drama the merrier!” she adds.

Credit: Jason Loucas

But she’s quick to point out that there’s a very important difference between “moody” and “I’m now in a filthy mood because I can’t tell the salt and pepper apart”. 

Mitchell says that if a restaurant has dimmed the lights so much that you have to wave your tabletop mushroom lamp around to read the menu, they’ve really stuffed up. Other lighting sins include ‘bad colour temp’ (which gives me troubling flashbacks to a restaurant I visited in Memphis that bathed the entire restaurant in blue light because it had a ‘blues music’ theme) and what she calls ‘meth lab lighting’ – such as accidental light bleeds from the kitchen’. No one needs to eat underneath lighting so fluorescent that it attracts the sniffer dogs.

Unflattering shadows are also a big no-no. If you hate them when they’re caused by downlights in hotel bathrooms you will hate them just as much when they make you look like the cover art for 2003’s ‘The Room’ (IYKYK) at the dinner table.

Credit: Steven Woodburn

However Daniel Hadida from the two Michelin starred Restaurant Pearl Morrisette in Canada’s Niagara region says that before I demand that all restaurants crank up their wattage to Taylor Swift stadium tour intensity, I need to understand that there can be good reasons – many that are quite imperceptible to the ordinary diner – for restaurants to play with the light and shade in their dining rooms. 

“You can hide things a bit in the dark, right?” he says. “The team can move around and clean and shift things. If something gets dropped or there is a mistake, you are less likely to pick it up. You don’t notice the staff’s little hand signals. Or the little chats they have to figure out their guests’ archetype or to tell each other that Table Six just farted.” (He does not, however, suggest that any kind of lighting will hide the smell of Table Six’s farts).  

But like Mitchell, he makes it very clear that there is a big difference between ‘good’ dark lighting and ‘bad’ dark lighting. “Dim lighting is a very different thing to insufficient lighting,” he says.

Credit: Shannon McGrath

In my view, the very best kind of restaurant lighting is the lighting you don’t notice at all. If the room seems comfortable and welcoming, and there’s a clarity to everything I’m looking at, then I think it’s done its job. If I look back over the photos I take of the dishes and the interiors and nothing looks malarial yellow or algae green, then I reckon they’ve nailed it.

And now, to complete my total transformation into a cantankerous old scold, let’s talk about restaurant noise levels…

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