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.

Techniques That Enable You To Improve Your Restaurant Design

I can remember good food. What I don’t remember is eating good food in a restaurant whose sense of style isn’t even the least appetizing. But maybe it’s because I don’t eat in those restaurants.

Here are five restaurant design tips that will help you recreate a cozy and inviting dining environment.

1. Speak to all five senses
Diane Chiasson says,

When done properly, food merchandising encompasses everything your customer feels, sees, smells and hears. It not only creates greater eye appeal but also increases the perceived value of a product, therefore achieving higher sales.

A general rule in effective restaurant design is to establish a mood that fires up all the senses. Foodservice is more than just trying to sell a product–you’re also selling a social experience. Such an environment serves to complement the main attraction.

2. Location, location
Opening a take-out joint in Bel-Air or a fine dining place in a slum neighborhood is a proven recipe for financial suicide.

Good restaurant design is about knowing your neighborhood’s eating habits and serving them what they want. Design your interior based on what you think jives well with the community outside. You might need to hire a restaurant consultant for this one.

3. The importance of food color
Colors have psychological effects on your customers and, most importantly, their appetites.

Lots of red and oranges are ideal if you serve hot and spicy foods, very Mexican. Neutral colors are good for a more traditional feel. On the other hand, black and gray colors are reserved for fine dining and high brow establishments.

4. Be flattering with the lighting
Never underestimate the power of natural lighting. Use natural lighting as much as possible, whenever possible, and avoid dark spots and corners in your dining area. Good lighting makes all the colors–and flavors–of the food stand out.

5. You must have personality
Above all else, your restaurant design/theme must have personality. The restaurant design is your first attempt at communicating with your customer (food only comes second). So okay. Your menu may be exquisite. But what will really set you apart from other restaurants is, you guessed it, having a great personality.

A consistent restaurant design, good food, and a friendly group of staff are the keys to a successful restaurant business venture.

These are simply general guidelines on how to pull off a successful restaurant design. I suddenly remembered this quote from American Beauty,

…in order to be successful, one must project an image of success at all times.

Perfect. The same goes for running a restaurant business. If you want customers to come eat at your place, show them a successful restaurant operator - show them a respectable and dignified restaurant design.

What Everybody Ought To Know About Food Visibility

These days when I walk into a restaurant, whether it’s commercial or otherwise, I’m always amazed at how the interior is a mess and that nothing contributes to the selling of food. The lighting is bland, the décor unattractive, the food shields block more than they show.

This is what experts in the foodservice industry calls “visual pollution,” and it’s become more of a problem as restaurant owners continue neglecting interior design as a way to cut down on costs.

Reggie Daniel says about visual pollution,

“For example, in many of the food courts or other types of cafeterias I’ve been to, I see bulky food shields over the food, blocking the sight line and creating shadows. It’s unappetizing to say the least.”

Fact is visual presentation is every bit as important as the taste of the food on the menu. This was discussed in detail in another article where I talked about Diane Chiasson’s Food Merchandising tips. Simply put, nobody wants to order something that doesn’t even look good in the first place.

Visibility sells. That’s the main thing, and restaurant owners need to remember that when they go about designing, or redesigning, their restaurants. Anything that creates visual pollution needs to go out. Focus on simplicity and promote a visual sense of cleanliness and purity in the dining area. If you’re going to use props, use ordinary kitchen items as they’re easier to relate to fresh food more than anything.

How do you distinguish what’s visual pollution and what isn’t? That’s easy. Something is visual pollution if it doesn’t put emphasis on the food.

One thing I particularly want to point out is the importance of using natural lighting to illuminate the food displays in and around the dining area.

Fluorescent bulbs consume electricity, and if you look closely they make ham appear green. I don’t know about you, but green-colored ham doesn’t do anything for my appetite. So avoid “office whites”, what fluorescent bulbs are called, and use natural lighting to maximum effect. I mean, hey, it’s free, what have you got to lose?

Finally Reggie says,

“By simplifying the décor, operators can put a greater emphasis on the food. Think of the old adage, ‘We eat with our eyes.’”

I believe in the second part, too. If I’m a customer and I’m going to order anything on your menu, I want to at least make sure it looks good and appetizing.

Green-colored ham? Thanks, but no thanks.