The very choice Mat­tgeeknz has writ­ten a guest review for us, because we knew we’d be unable to write a review about being blind­folded and stick­ing everything put in front of us in our mouths without being smutty about it.

Cap­it­ol and CBM have teamed up to host three blind-din­ing even­ings in Wel­ling­ton. The first was on Monday, and there are two more sit­tings on Monday and Tues­day next week. It’s a fun twist on the din­ing exper­i­ence: you’re blind­folded for the entirety of your meal, and at the end of each course you’re told what you’ve just eaten.

After meet­ing at the Embassy and enjoy­ing hor d’oeuvres and a glass of cham­pagne, you’re taken down­stairs in groups to the front of Cap­it­ol, where you’re asked to don a blind­fold before you enter the res­taur­ant. Once you can no longer see, the wait staff lead you to your table, and from there you begin to map out your sur­round­ings.

With the blind­fold on, your sense of space becomes greatly reduced.  There are the things you can touch: the table, your wine glass, your water glass, and maybe a wall beside you. Your entire imme­di­ate world is defined by what you can feel with your fin­ger­tips. Bey­ond that there is merely a ring of sound – the muddled con­ver­sa­tions of oth­ers – which gives you no sense of depth or dis­tance.

The food is excep­tion­al, and the wine well-matched. The meal has been designed to be fin­ger-friendly, and every dish not only tastes unique but feels unique. The entrees are served in chinese soup spoons and shot­glasses, while the mains and desserts are either served as-is or with­in sturdy ramekins. Without sight, you’re free to con­cen­trate on fla­vours and tex­tures. There was noth­ing served that a seasoned res­taur­ant-goer would­n’t hap­pily eat, and aside from a couple of adven­tur­ous choices, they haven’t taken the oppor­tun­ity to feed blithely unas­sum­ing diners a whole bunch of freaky gul­lets and organs. You’re in safe hands. Guess­ing what you’re being served is part of the fun, and if you’re right more often than wrong then you’re doing very well indeed.

There’s an oppor­tun­ity to take off your blind­fold between the entree and main courses. Although most people do, I recom­mend that you don’t – if you can stand it – as the intens­ity of smell, sound and touch is so greatly heightened by the time you get to dessert that it becomes the high­light of the whole exper­i­ence.

Cap­it­ol have blacked out their win­dows so any unco­ordin­ated efforts you have in get­ting food to your mouth are not seen by cas­u­al pass­ersby. They have left small pee­p­h­oles, how­ever, so a suf­fi­ciently motiv­ated per­son could wander past Cap­it­ol dur­ing the next sit­tings and take a peek to see what a res­taur­ant full of fum­bling blind­folded diners looks like.

By the time the meal con­cludes and you take your blind­fold off you have a head full of memor­ies, and not one of them is visu­al. They’re all aud­it­ory, olfact­ory or tact­ile: bursts of fla­vour, the stem of a wine glass, over­heard con­ver­sa­tions, or the touch of your wife’s hand from across the table. What I also found was that we had an extremely focussed con­ver­sa­tion. Without visu­al cues our words had to be well-chosen if we wanted to under­stand each oth­er.