A friendly young host greets you as you enter through the side door of one of the fine dining restaurants on McAllister Street. He then leads you down a few steps and into a dim and narrow hallway, where he seats you in a nice, comfortable, cushy round couch. The lighting and the soothing music let you know that you're about to embark on a peaceful journey. The candles, the mirrors, and the modern decorations on the walls that surround the place give off an aura of chic novelty.

A few moments later, host and manager Christopher Lynch comes back with a menu. After you are done perusing the array of uniquely Californian salads, entrées, and desserts, he takes your order down and then a waitress greets you. She's like any other waitress, except that she's visually impaired. You put your hand on her left shoulder and she leads you to a room on the other side of the hanging beads. You are embarking on an adventure at Opaque, a restaurant that is more concerned about how their food tastes than how it looks.

"Opaque is a cool dining experience where you deprive yourself of a major sense that we all take for granted, and challenge your other senses that we often neglect," says Benjamin Uphues, owner of Opaque.

The dining room is pitch black, and guests must rely completely on their sense of touch, smell, hearing, and taste. The use of cell phones is strongly discouraged since the light from the phone can ruin the whole experience. "It's so dark that you can't see your hand an inch away," says Uphues.

To accommodate customers in the dark dining room, Opaque uses the "blind guide." All the servers at Opaque are blind or visually impaired. Uphues says that it is about guiding the sighted guests into their world. "I help people learn and grow to overcome their fear, and to educate people on what it's like to be blind," says Katie Phan, who has been serving Opaque's curious customers since August 2008.

"We are looking for visually impaired servers because they're the only ones who can do the job," says Uphues, who looks for his servers at local institutions for the blind, such as the Lions Center for the Blind in Oakland.

Phan, who is a psychology major at City College of San Francisco and San Francisco State University, says she is truly grateful for the opportunity of doing a job that sighted people do. "It allows me to be like my peers and fit in," says Phan. "We all want to be productive members of society."

Uphues says his first experience at dining in the dark in Europe changed his life and opened his eyes to a whole new world, even though his eyes had to be closed for it to opened. "I was amazed by the profoundness of the idea--it is not a restaurant--it's an experience," says Uphues.

To make sure that customers explore their sense of taste to the maximum, the food at Opaque is created with explosive multiple flavors and smells. "Overall, we focus on flavors, textures, and temperature because that is what's easy to define in the dark," says Uphues, who also opened an Opaque in Los Angeles and San Diego.

"When you shut off one sense, all the others are heightened," says Lynch, twenty-four. Lynch, who has been working at Opaque since November of last year, says Opaque has been a great success, and many of their customers come back a second time and bring another "virgin."

As you walk past the hanging beads and out of the dark dining room, you are given your sight back. The restaurant crew hopes to teach their customers the power of sight, and to be grateful for it.

"It's to experience and to reevaluate the easy things that we all have taken for granted in life," says Uphues.