Thanks to Crafty Acoustics, Voices Carry No More at Jatoba

In "Restaurants are starting to cater to an older crowd that wants a hip vibe – with less noise," The Globe and Mail reports on restaurant acoustics and, improbably, looks outside of Toronto: "Jatoba, a chic, new restaurant in downtown Montreal, had been open a month and was drawing boffo crowds and reviews with a Japanese fusion menu devised by star chefs Antonio Park and Olivier Vigneault. But there was something about the dining room that didn’t sound right to co-owner Alexandre Besnard. The problem wasn’t when the place was full, but in the early evening, when the first diners were settling in."

The problem, Besnard tells reporter Robert Everett-Green, was that "voices were reverberating all over the place. It wasn’t cozy; there was a dichotomy between what you were feeling and what you were seeing." Some bolts of Japanese cloth later and Jatoba is no longer "sleepy." Go read the full article here.