In a toss-up between resurrecting a 15 year old thread and starting a new one, I'm going with resurrection 🙃.
I recently enjoyed this article in the NYT: Annoyed by Restaurant Playlists, a Master Musician Made His Own about how Ryuichi Sakamoto came to compile the playlist for the Manhattan restaurant, Kajitsu and I loved this letter he sent to the chef after being so annoyed by the background music that he left the restaurant:
Quote“I love your food, I respect you and I love this restaurant, but I hate the music,” he remembered writing. “Who chose this? Whose decision of mixing this terrible roundup? Let me do it. Because your food is as good as the beauty of Katsura Rikyu.” (He meant the thousand-year-old palatial villa in Kyoto, built to some degree on the aesthetic principles of imperfections and natural circumstances known as wabi-sabi.) “But the music in your restaurant is like Trump Tower.”
Here's a Sakamoto-designed playlist:
I'm an admirer of Mr. Sakamoto but have to say that a few of the tracks he selected for this remind me of the trippy sounds that came out of the Muzak machine when the tape was playing backwards at a restaurant where I worked 
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