#themed dining

Space 220 Lounge.

The idea is that you take a space elevator up 220 miles to have dinner on a space station.

Wonderful dinner at 'Ohana in the Polynesian Village Resort. Lucky to score a waterfront table with view of the water pageant light floats and the special Halloween fireworks show from the Magic Kingdom across the Lagoon.

Ever wonder how the blind eats their meals? We often think of their struggle to do daily activities such as crossing the street or reading. At Opaque, they give you the experience of dining in complete darkness, just like the blind. There are several locations for Opaque and several other restaurants that try to do similar experiences. New York has one but it's not as fun because instead of pitch darkness, they blindfold you.

It's a hidden corridor where you are greeted by the host and brought down the stairs. You sit there and your order is taken before you walk into the dining room. You are then introduced to your waiter/waitress, whom are all legally blind. They are very careful in making you feel comfortable in any way possible and emphasizing in turning off cell phones and any other light producing instruments.

I won't go into detail on how they did things or what happened throughout the dinner, as the whole fun of it is really experiencing it yourself and being extremely confused. You'd think you'd see the waiters go through doors that lead to the kitchen, exposing light, but the only light I saw was from some idiot lighting up his watch light (don't be that guy and ruin other people's experiences!). If you're like me who needs to have an eating pattern in switching between foods to balance out taste, you're at a handicap eating blind. In this case, it actually made things interesting. They give you a few things off the menu for you to eat. One they tell you what it is, and the other you'll have to guess. Your eyes never really adjust to anything but you do find yourself adjusting to ways and means of eating your meal.

You know how they say if one of your senses is impaired, another gets sharper? Either because it was a Wednesday or because of the space, dinner can get quite easily disrupted by loud tables near by. I think people naturally kept their voices down because you don't know how close the table next to you really is. We had this lady who was a bit tipsy and very talkatively loud near by. She was shushed by another nearby table but it didn't work. Unfortunately it really did effect our experience.

I actually found out about this place while surfing on Restaurant.com. I usually use this website to help alleviate financial burdens of a vacation, while eating at some decent restaurants. With a little bit of hard research and patience in waiting for the discount codes to come around, it can certainly help out. For $2.00, we were able to take $25 off our dinner for two. If you have Bank of America, they have this program called Add It Up, and with that, it brought down the certificate to $1.70 with remaining refunded to my account.

Name: Opaque

Location: 689 McAllister Street, San Francisco, CA