Guests across restaurants, bars, cafes, and eateries are no longer simply looking for great food. Nor are they looking solely for comfortable seating with loads of natural light, free wi-fi, and a friendly team of serving staff to make them feel welcome.
A reputable and high quality dining experience in today’s market means uniting the setting and environment with service, the menu, and all the other little features which play a part in fine tuning the guest experience.
A great place to start is with interior design, embodying the concept and cuisine of your restaurant or dining space within the very surroundings, and selecting furnishings and other interior details which bring to life the experience you want to deliver.
In this blog post, we’re sharing some insights to help create a dining experience which is memorable for all the right reasons.
The importance of restaurant design
Restaurant design starts with your branding, encouraging you as a business owner to consider the kind of experience that you want to market and that you want your guests and customers to enjoy. When selecting everything from the furniture to the wall colours and finer accessories to dress your restaurant, you should be looking to create a space which embodies the experience you want to deliver; which impacts the way the customer interacts with your restaurant, and which supports the team who are responsible for delivering that experience.
And that’s not all. As we will go on to discuss in more detail, restaurant design plays a major role in your direct marketing approach – with the age of social media enabling customers to play a major role in your word of mouth marketing. When photo opportunities become a part of your restaurant design, you create a business which lends itself to visual sharing and marketing.
Without further ado, let’s consider some of the most important elements of restaurant design and how they impact the experience.
The basics of restaurant design
The following aspects of restaurant interior design all play both functional and aesthetic roles in the way your business premises is used.
Floor Space and Layout
This is the part of your restaurant design that should come before everything else – with consideration as to the placement of the different components of your restaurant and the interaction between those different spaces. Navigation plays a big role in facilitating quick and easy movement between tables for your serving team, while a combination of open and more private dining spaces can help you restaurant to be perceived as accessible by all sorts of diners and customers.
Quality Furnishings
The furnishings you bring into your restaurant should compliment the overall theme and design, and should be comfortable as well as aesthetically pleasing. Everything from the placement of furnishing to how comfortable they are can play a part in how the customer interacts with and uses your restaurant, with quick service businesses typically placing more emphasis on quantity and speed of service, while luxury restaurants consider ways of making guests feel at ease in relaxing chairs.
And while we’re on the topic of fine-tuning the experience and the way diners interact with the space…
Lighting and other details
Interior design can be completely transformed by the use of lighting – with the best restaurants and dining spaces using a collection of different forms of lighting to make the best use of every corner of their space. Typically, natural lighting is great for daytime dining and for making your restaurant feel bright and open, while ambient lighting plays a part in setting up a romantic vibe, and accent lighting gives each table a feeling of privacy and quiet.
In terms of the other details to consider, selecting furnishings and design accessories which double as photo opportunities and which bring your branding and theme to life all play a big part in enhancing the customer or diner experience. A few ideas include colourful walls, vibrant centrepieces, unique toilets, ceiling-mounted accessories, inside trees and floral displays, and decoration which lends itself to your business and theme. You could even go so far as to work these ideas into the menu, with unique cocktails and innovative dishes.
Creating an inviting atmosphere
In short, designing a restaurant for the modern day customer and diner means bridging the gap between the luxury of a meal out, and what is considered an immersive and enjoyable experience. Diners want to enjoy a cohesive experience which ticks all the boxes, which is immersive but not over the top, and which puts an equal emphasis on service and quality of food.
Here at Carroll Design, our team can help to bring your vision to life, working on everything from new concepts to redesign projects and more.