’Good to see you," he says.

Michael Dalrymple does that a lot. He says he “watches” television, like “The Simpsons.” He “reads.” He does all sorts of things you ascribe to people with functioning eyes, but he does so without them.

Dalrymple is blind, and I’m taking him to a new restaurant in town to “see” what it’s like — to view the establishment for a different point of view. Call it a twist on the “blind dining” trend, which started in 1999 at the Blind Cow restaurant in Zurich, Switzerland, and has since spread to the United States from New York to San Francisco.

In trendy restaurants across the country, blind dining can involve a darkened restaurant, where diners have to be escorted to their table, or a dining room in which all patrons wear blindfolds. I thought it would be interesting to see how Dalrymple does it. Every day.

I also wondered if the 35-year-old would see — there’s that word again — the trend from a Seinfeldian perspective. George Costanza once likened the wearing of glasses for fashion to using a wheelchair to cruise around town. He took exception. But Dalrymple doesn’t.

“I’ve heard of restaurants with blind dining,” he said, smiling widely. “I would feel at home.”

A young corporate attorney, Dalrymple is something of a gourmet-about-town, favoring local restaurants the caliber of Oakley’s and Amalfi on 86th Street (no-brainers for culinary-savvy locals) as well as gems like Bosphorus in Fountain Square and the Korean of Mama’s House on Pendleton Pike.

He grew up near Broad Ripple and still lives in the area, close to another favorite, H2O. He attended North Central High School, then Earlham College in Richmond, went to law school at IU, then clerked with the Indiana Supreme Court before going into employment law five years ago.

Dalrymple lost his eyesight when he was 3 and a half years old, when the retinal disease that claimed his mother’s vision began affecting him, too. His father is blind as well, but not completely. (“He’s what we would call a ‘partial.’.”)

At restaurants, he puts his faith in others. On this recent Wednesday night, at Downtown’s new Moroccan restaurant, Saffron Cafe, that means trusting our server. He can ask to have the full menu read to him, but he usually defers to recommendations of the chef. “You can taste the experience of the chef in his food,” Dalrymple said. Besides, he’s skeptical that his palate is exceptional merely because he is blind. “Everyone thinks that blind people have super-smell and super-hearing, but physically we’re no different. I have to pay more attention to those senses is all.”

But he does have some powers of his own. He has, for instance, what is known as “shadow vision” — a skill or talent that not all blind people have.

“It’s very hard to explain. But I can tell right now, by the noise, that we’re in a small place, a square room, and there’s something over there,” he said, motioning to a corner where a bar and open kitchen sit. Dalrymple can walk down a hallway and know when he is passing an open door.

“By the way,” he said, as our waiter poured a small glass of bubble tea for a neighboring table, “he’s pouring the tea exactly as it’s described over the Internet. High enough to cause bubbles.”

Beside all that, Dalrymple does have exceptional taste. He can describe the difference between a great small-batch bourbon like Van Winkle and a single malt like The McCallan 18. He favors English and Belgian beers, and drinks almost exclusively red wine (cabernets).

He is a man of international flavors. Dalrymple studied abroad in Germany and Austria for six months. He went to Greece and Hungary and the Czech Republic from there. In law school, he spent a semester in London, and, during that time, he visited Scotland. He’s been to Belgium and the Philippines, and he has many sensory reminiscences of Spain, whether the intoxicating aroma of orange trees in the streets of Sevilla, or the cacophony of sound and overwhelming delights on Las Ramblas in Barcelona.

For the moment, though, Dalrymple traces his hand across the table in search of his water glass. He has the taktouka shrimp as an appetizer, which means delicately touching the small bowl with his fingers to feel out the Kalamata olives and artichoke hearts, the fresh diced cucumber and tomato. He knows how to find the edge of the shrimp, so as not to eat the shell on the tail.

His iced tea arrives, but he forgets it is there for some time. He has the Atlantic salmon with charmoula, oven-baked and topped with cilantro pesto, for his entree. He notes the sauce is “aggressive, but enjoyable” and has to touch his plate ever-so-softly every now and then, to sense where the meat ends and the couscous pile begins. He does the same to his tiramisu for dessert.

Not everything in his life is based as much on touch as one would suspect. He may tap a white cane, and indeed, he has his with him tonight, but it isn’t as if he has to find Common Law tomes printed in Braille.

“It’s all electronic now,” he said. “The advances in assistive technology make it not perfect, but amazing all the same.”

He takes out his phone, for instance, and holds the corner up to an ear while it speed-reads names from his address book. He’s meeting a friend at the Elbow Room after dinner for a nightcap, a different set of experiences. I help him across the street, but he doesn’t need me after that. If he can navigate his way through the physical world of the dinner table, he can find his own way to a bartender and a nightcap.