Restaurant interior design essentials are very important when starting your new or remodeled restaurant designs. While good food and good customer service are crucial for return business, the ambiance of a restaurant is also important. You want customers to feel comfortable and enjoy their meals. Restaurant interior design and layout sets the stage for customer’s dining experience.
The design of a restaurant should be a balance between a welcoming ambiance and maximum seating capacity.
In other words, you want to pack in enough customers to keep busy and turn a profit, while at the same time making guests feel comfortable. Some types of restaurants focus on seating capacity rather than interior design.
Restaurant Interior Design Essentials Problem Areas
In a perfect restaurant, there would be no such thing as a bad table. However, few restaurants can escape having at least one problem area in their dining room. Here are a few common restaurant problem areas or places that customers don’t usually want to sit. Customers don’t like tables near the kitchen entrance, restrooms, and front entrance. Tables smack in the middle of the dining room are not always popular with dining patrons either. To help disguise problem areas, you can try placing dividers, such as wooden partitions, tall plants or screens in between tables.
Consider relocating a wait station or bus station, if possible, to a problem seating area rather than a dining table. One way to spot problem areas before opening day is to sit in every single chair in your dining room. Study the view from each seat and you may find that one has a direct view of the bus station, while another gets a draft from the front door.
Restaurant Interior Design
An important (and expensive) consideration for any restaurant, either new or existing, is heating and cooling options. Restaurant kitchens put out a lot of heat, smells, and smoke. Make sure that your commercial range has proper outside ventilation, with the right kind of hood and ventilation fans. Proper air conditioning is also essential to any successful restaurant design.
Nothing will turn patrons away faster than a non-air conditioned dining room in the middle of a summer heat wave. It may be tempting to skimp in this area, but in the end, a poor ventilation and air conditioning can cost you a lot more in lost sales.
Professional Restaurant Kitchen Design
Restaurant Music
Silence is definitely not golden in most restaurants and generally not a good idea. Music will set the tone in a restaurant just as much as the style of the menu or the artwork on the walls. Avoid CDs that are repetitious, for the sake of your staff, which has to listen to it over and over again. Radio is an inexpensive option for casual dining establishments, but non-commercial channels, like streaming music is preferable. Live entertainment, which can be expensive, adds a definite sense of ambiance. A good musician or group can draw in crowds better than any dinner special. Many restaurants feature live music on weekends or certain nights of the week.
Restaurant Restrooms
Restaurant interior design essentials and ambiance carry through to restaurant restrooms. Restrooms should be checked at least once at the start of every shift (preferably more often if it is busy). A hostess or bus person can be assigned the task of refilling paper products, taking out the trash and making sure there are no other problems within the restrooms.
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