Nocti Vagus

“Nicht sehen heisst anders sehen.” Berlin’s “dark” restaurant and club, where the entire meal is served in total darkness. Menu (readable) and more at Nocti Vagus

We received a comment from a reader in 2006:

I went to the dark restaurant the other night, and it was an excellent experience, but unfortunately not for the actual food. In terms of food it was one of the worst restaurants I’ve ever been to, of any cost, and this was in fact maybe the most expensive I’ve ever paid for (a friend and I paid a total of 80 euros for the 3 course meal and one drink each). I had the vegetarian meal, and my friend had the seafood, and we both had the same experience. The salad and soup was fine, but the main course and dessert was terrible. It seemed a lot of the food wasn’t fresh (e.g. crumbed fish-finger nuggets in salad, canned fruit), and my main course consisted of a lot of tough, spongey material (I think oyster mushrooms and wheat-based meat substitute, which tasted like it had been cooked in animal fat), soaked in a cheesy sauce, and some fairly plain cheesy potato fritters. My dessert seemed to be quite tasteless canned fruit (served in the syrup). It seems the reviews from a few years ago rate the whole thing highly, but I saw one recent one that reported the same experience we had - “you guide the fork to your mouth in the dark to bite down on chunks of fat, and most of the rest of the meat consists of cords”. However, it was great fun, and I would still recommend it, one just has to be prepared to hate the food.

Saarbrücker Str. 36-38 (not sure if this is actually Mitte or Prenzlauer Berg)

Posted by Andrew at September 2, 2004 08:11 AM