Martes, Nobyembre 15, 2011

Restaurant Interior Design: The Missing Piece from Your Restaurant

Price, value, location, service and, of course, the food are all areas which restaurateurs must optimise if they are to make back their often considerable investment. There isn’t a restaurant owner in the land who doesn’t work carefully to ensure their food is of the very best quality. They wouldn’t dream of opening their doors if they didn’t think their service was suitable for the area in which they were situated. It’s surprising, then, the number for whom restaurant interior design is a low priority.

The food must be good and the price right, but it won’t matter if people don’t want to be IN your restaurant. Worse still is if the layout of your restaurant is such that it is not practical for an efficient operation. It won't be a pleasant place to be if waiting staff are constantly having to squeeze past diners or if one table has to put up with people queuing up next to them for the toilet.

The first thing a restaurant interior designer will do when hired to design or redesign your restaurant is to consider the ergonomics of the place. They will ensure that the layout of your space is optimised for efficient operation. Restaurants are commonly and necessarily located in prime retail locations, meaning that space is limited. Failure to adapt to this limited space can be disastrous. If waiting staff have to squeeze between tables or if they have to pass through the same gap in order to reach a number of tables, accidents are likely to happen. Staff could collide, guests might shift their chairs out suddenly, etc. Good, ergonomic restaurant interior design will ensure that the distance a waiter or waitress has to carry plates is as small as possible. In multi-layered restaurants, a good old fashioned dumb waiter prevents staff having to carry trays up and down stairs. Many restaurants are designed to ensure there are multiple paths for waiting staff to take to most tables, so the chances of collisions or staff have to queue are reduced

Restaurant interior designers can work with you whether you are building an entirely new set of premises, completely redesigning a newly leased property or just giving your old restaurant an overhaul. Each offers its own set of challenges and rewards, but that’s OK; compromises are terrible, but restrictions are wonderful. Restrictions tell a designer the size and shape of their canvas and what colour paints they have to use. It is the design that makes a great restaurant as much as the area in which you have to work; the Ivy is down a relatively minor side street and yet is one of London’s most exclusive places to dine.

The cardinal sin of restaurant interior design is to go for the generic. Unless you want your restaurant to look like a McBurger outlet, then its interior design has to have somethingt that marks it out as unique. In extreme cases, one can end up with restaurants such as New York’s famous BED (now closed), where diners ate reclined on four poster beds. More commonly, this can mean carefully thought out design choices which reflect some internally consistent thought.

No matter the size of your restaurant, it needs to be a place people WANT to be. Food tastes better when people are enjoying themselves. Great design means yours isn’t just a great restaurant; it’s a destination.

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