Five Action Ideas To Impress With Your Restaurant Design

George Bernard Shaw said, “There is no love sincerer than the love of food.”

It’s true, if you think about it, every second commercial is about food, every second episode of a TV show has a lunch or a dinner scene, and you can’t take a walk outside in the city without seeing or smelling a restaurant. Food is the world’s most popular product.

But the design of your restaurant is important, too. As an operator, you need to impress customers—if you want to turn them into patrons—not just with the taste of the food but also with the overall dining experience. This is what I believe is a mark of a true entrepreneur, what separates the men from the boys.

Here are five restaurant design tips to help bring more customers to your place:

1. Go all out outside
A restaurant should have curb appeal. Enhance your restaurant design’s curb appeal by investing on good lighting, the exterior and design elements updated based on the time of year, the landscape around your restaurant properly maintained.

Make sure to highlight your restaurant’s name out front. Diners only eat at restaurants they can find.

2. Polish with paint
White walls give off a clean, sanitary vibe. But if you ask me white-painted walls are too safe for comfort. They don’t emphasize your restaurant design or say anything about it.

Paint the walls with a color that suits the brand personality you’re going for. Give your place a sense of currency, but make sure it fits your type of restaurant. Good use of colors allows any establishment to make a bold statement even when budget is an issue.

3. Proper lighting whets the appetite
You should read my article What Everybody Ought To Know About Food Visibility. It talks about customers being able to glimpse the food before they place an order as well as the importance of using natural lighting in and around the restaurant.

4. Fine dining with fine art
This one is a tried-and-true approach, especially for fine dining restaurants.

Decorate the restaurant with pieces of artwork—mosaics, sculptures, mounted paintings, murals. Great art is a fine compliment to good food, and goes a long way into supporting your brand personality.

For example, the Brickhouse bar. Brickhouse has a large mural painting of 1930s San Francisco. It is by all means a beautiful background for the dining area, and goes well in complementing the establishment’s color scheme.

5. Upholstery is just as important
When it comes to upholstery, wear and tear is your worst enemy—that is, if it doesn’t become outdated first. No one wants to sit at a table with wine or coffee stains on the upholstery. So change the upholstery from time to time, at least once every couple months, to give your restaurant design a fresh and updated appeal.

It is just as disastrous to have the wrong accessories in your room as it is to wear sport shoes with an evening dress.

Dorothy Draper, interior designer.

Same goes for restaurants. I can go on and on about tips on restaurant design. But in the end, it’s you who gets to decide which goes well with what, and the answer lies—where else?—on your type of restaurant and brand personality. Take a long hard look at your brand, and draw inspiration from there.

I hope you find great success on your restaurant design.