Restaurant and hospitality interiors

Service flow comes first

Walk the plan as a server carrying three plates, then as a guest arriving, then as a busser clearing a four-top at the peak of service. Every collision is a problem that will happen a hundred times a night.

• Kitchen to pass to floor. The shortest, clearest route in the building, and it must not cross the guest arrival path.
• Dish return. Dirty plates should not travel through the middle of the dining room. This is the route most often left out of a plan.
• Server stations. Water, cutlery, napkins and a screen, distributed so nobody walks the length of the room for a fork.
• Arrival and waiting. Somewhere to stand that is not in the service route, and not in the doorway.
• Restroom route. Should not pass the kitchen door or through the middle of a seating group.
• Delivery and waste. Not through the front door, and not at the same time as service.

Every one of these is free to fix at the plan stage and permanent afterwards.

How far apart should restaurant tables be?

There is a genuine tension here: more seats means more covers and a tighter room, and past a point the tightness costs more in experience than it gains in capacity. The judgment is about what kind of business it is — a room designed for two-hour dinners and a room designed for fast turns are not the same room, and pretending one is the other is the most common planning error in hospitality.

Getting the seating mix right

• Match the mix to the party sizes you actually get. Most restaurants seat far more twos than fours and plan the reverse.
• Tables that combine. Square two-tops that push together into fours and sixes give flexibility that fixed booths cannot.
• Banquettes seat more per square foot than chairs, because nothing has to pull out behind them — the dimensions are in window seats and banquettes.
• Perimeter seating first. Guests prefer a wall or a banquette behind them; the middle of a room fills last.
• Give the room a range. Booths, banquettes, tables and bar seating suit different occasions, and a room of identical four-tops feels like a canteen.
• Accessible seating distributed through the room rather than grouped in one corner.
• Consider what a table looks like empty. A room is judged at 6 p.m. when it is a third full, not at 8 when it is not.

Why do acoustics decide the business?

This is the most under-invested element in hospitality interiors and the one guests complain about most.

• The materials that photograph well are all hard. Concrete, tile, glass, exposed ceilings and bare tables reflect sound, and a room at capacity becomes genuinely difficult to converse in.
• Loud rooms lose customers — particularly older guests and anyone with hearing difficulty, which is a substantial share of a dining market.
• The ceiling does the most work. Acoustic treatment overhead, whether panels, baffles or a sprayed finish, is the highest-value intervention available.
• Upholstery absorbs. Banquettes, upholstered chairs and fabric panels all help, and they are things a dining room wants anyway.
• Break up long hard surfaces. A continuous glass wall or a long bare masonry run is a reflector.
• Zone the noise. Bar and open kitchen at one end, quieter seating at the other, with something between them.
• Soft flooring where it can be maintained, and rugs where hygiene rules allow.

Lighting a dining room

• Light the tables, not the room. Pools of light on tables with darker space between reads as intimate; an evenly bright room reads as a cafeteria.
• Light the faces. Light coming only from directly overhead puts shadows under eyes. Wall light, candles and low pendants all correct it.
• High color rendering so food looks like food. This is not a detail in a restaurant.
• Dimmed and scheduled. A dining room needs different levels at lunch, at 6 p.m. and at 9, and someone has to be able to set them without thinking.
• Warm. 2700K or lower for evening dining.
• Staff need to see. Server stations, the pass and the route to the kitchen need working light that does not spill onto the guests.
• Emergency and egress lighting is a code requirement and part of the design, not an afterthought bolted on at inspection.

The general principles are in the lighting design guide; the application here is simply more demanding.

Specification, wear and code

• Contract-grade everything. Chairs get sat on hundreds of times a week and dragged across the floor; residential frames and joints fail fast.
• Fabrics rated for hospitality, with a high rub count and a cleanable finish — the criteria are in choosing upholstery and fabrics.
• Flooring rated for commercial traffic, with slip resistance specified for a floor that will get wet.
• Protect every corner and every chair-rail height. Chair backs will hit walls and banquettes; detail for it.
• Design for cleaning. Every junction, ledge and upholstered seam is something staff must clean nightly. Fewer of them is a design decision.
• Code is the framework, not a constraint to work around. Occupancy load, egress width, exit routes, restroom counts, fire ratings and accessibility all follow from the plan — and occupancy load in particular can cap the seat count regardless of what fits.
• Health department requirements govern surfaces, hand sinks and finishes in and around food areas, and they are confirmed with the authority rather than assumed.

Jan Revels

ASID Allied Professional Interior Designer · Chateau Concepts, Dallas

Jan has practiced interior design in Dallas since 1997 and founded Chateau Concepts in 2001. She holds a BFA in Interior Design from the University of North Texas. She designs and general-contracts residential and commercial projects across the Park Cities, Preston Hollow and North Dallas. Read her full profile →

Written and reviewed by Jan Revels before publication