Sir - Maybe Katherine MacAlister is too young to remember the news about the opening of the first restaurant named "Blindekuh", serving food in the dark in 1999 in Zurich, Switzerland.

In any case, she is guilty of not researching her story about Dining in the dark (Oxfordshire Food, May 16). . . the name for a children's game known here as 'blindman's buff', in which one person is blindfolded and has to find the other players. It all started with a "Dialog im Dunkeln" (Dialogue in the dark) exhibition at the Zurich Museum of Design from February to April 1998. In 1998, a project team consisting of three blind men and one partly-sighted man set up the charitable foundation Blind-Liecht (blind-light) with the purpose of promoting the understanding between blind people and those who can see in our society. To this purpose the foundation develops and supports projects for the creation of work places for blind and visually impaired people.

The first enterprise of the foundation Blind-Liecht was the restaurant "blindekuh" in Zurich, which opened its doors on September 17, 1999, as the world's first dark restaurant, which has been successfully copied several times.

The "Unsicht-bar" (Invisible or "Nonsight Bar") followed in April 2001 in Cologne and another "Unsicht-bar" opened in Berlin in September 2002. Thereafter followed the Paris "Dans le Noir" in September 2004. The second blindekuh opened in Basel in February 2005. The Dialogue museum in Frankfurt saw the opening of "Taste to Darkness" in December 2005 and the London "Dans le Noir" opened in February 2006. And so it goes on with Hamburg and Moscow. (www.blindekuh.ch) Katherine MacAlister's article is a bit thin on information and misses the important point of the existence of those restaurants.

Gisela Cooper, Oxford