The clanging you hear when you walk into a new restaurant, that industrial percussion of pans and shouted tickets and the hiss of a flattop, some of it is deliberate. A piece running on MSN confirms what many of us who love restaurants have suspected for years: open kitchens with hard surfaces and zero sound absorption are a design choice, not an accident.

The reasoning is mostly aesthetic. An open kitchen says transparency, says craft, says we have nothing to hide. Exposed steel and ductwork and concrete read as industrial-chic, and the noise that comes with them reads as energy. A quiet dining room, to a certain kind of designer, feels dead. A loud one feels alive, busy, the kind of place where things are happening.

And the acoustics are brutal on purpose, or at least brutal by negligence that nobody bothers to correct. Hard floors, bare walls, open ceilings. Every surface reflects sound instead of swallowing it. My grandmother's kitchen in Campania was loud too, but that was because six people were arguing about the sauce. Loudness as a byproduct of life is one thing. Loudness as decor is another.

Then there is the uncomfortable business angle, which the reporting touches on and which I've heard from restaurant people myself: loud rooms turn tables faster. When conversation requires effort, diners don't linger over a second coffee. They eat, they leave, the seat fills again. Ambient noise also seems to nudge drinking, and drinks carry the profit margin in most dining rooms. I don't believe every owner sits in a back office plotting decibels against revenue, but the incentive is there, and nobody rushes to fix it.

The costs are real, though. Older diners struggle. Anyone with hearing aids suffers through a meal that's supposed to be a pleasure. Servers go home with strained voices. And the kitchen staff, my people, spend entire shifts inside the loudest corner of the building. Hearing loss runs through this profession like tomato through a Sunday ragu.

I wrote recently about restaurants going analog, pushing back against screens and noise of every kind, and I keep returning to the same idea: spectacle is not flavor. A kitchen should be visible because the cooking deserves to be seen, not because the roar makes the room feel more expensive than it is. Some of the best meals of my life happened in near silence, in tiny rooms where the loudest thing was the pasta water.

If a restaurant's food is good, it doesn't need a soundtrack of clanging steel to convince you. If it needs the noise, ask what the noise is covering.