restaurant furniture design

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How to Make Your Restaurant Stand Out

restaurant dancingHaving your own restaurant can be a very lucrative but tough business. The following tips will give you some ideas on how to get that extra edge over your competition:

Offer Live Music

Why not hire a band and let your customers enjoy some live music? If you have live music, more customers will be enticed to visit your restaurant. Eating in a rather plain restaurant without any entertainment at all can make your dining experience dull and boring. Regardless of the genre of music played by the band you will hire, live music will surely be one of your aces over your competitors. Don’t forget to let your diners know that the band accepts special requests. This is a great bonus for people celebrating anniversaries and birthdays.

Leave Some Empty Space for Dancing

Have you ever imagined operating a restaurant where you can leave an empty place for dancing? Combine this with a live band or a juke box and you will ensure your customers have a night to remember. (more…)

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Use the Digital World to Draw More Customers to Your Restaurant

What are your customers and all of those potential customers doing when they aren’t enjoying a meal at your restaurant? Well, when they aren’t at work most people spend oodles of time on the web. Of course, quite a few of them are probably on the net even when they are at work, but that’s beside the point! Once you realize how much time people spend on the web, you can see what a powerful tool it can be. If you have only a limited web presence right now, beef it up.

You need to have a website for your restaurant for starters. It doesn’t have to be full of bells and whistles, and you don’t have to spend a fortune to get it set up. However, you want to try to set the right tone with your site. It should match the ambience that you are trying to create inside your eatery.

Make sure that you have your menu up on your site so people know what they are going to find in terms of eats. You also want to have some photos of your restaurant. Have a gallery of shots of the exterior and the interior to show your restaurant furniture and seating arrangement. Highlight the best parts of your restaurant. You can hire a professional to take the photos or you can do it on your own. Just be sure to put up clean and clear photos. That means the snapshots you take with your cell phone probably aren’t going to cut it.

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Feng Shui for Restaurants

I know the title probably caused a few raised eyebrows. I mean, we all know that Feng Shui is used in homes and apartments to improve positive energy and create a more comfortable atmosphere in the living space, but what does that have to do with a restaurant?

Feng Shui is an ancient Chinese art that focuses on using aesthetics to improve the positive energy, or chi, in a space. It tries to bring harmony and balance to an area by using colors, décor, wholesome forms, locations, visuals, and furniture placing.

Despite the fact that we mostly connect Feng Shui with private homes, any place where people spent time can benefit from the calming effects of this ancient Chinese art. Restaurants in particular, with their large traffic of clients, can benefit from implementing a few Feng Shui ideas while decorating and designing the interior.

The following tips are a list of things to keep in mind when trying to implement Feng Shui ideas in your restaurant. In the next posts we will try to go in to deeper details about a few of the ideas.

Colors:

The different colors of the rainbow all have different meanings and we all react to them in different ways. Certain colors will evoke specific emotions or thoughts when seen. Red is a color that excites passion and love and increases appetites. It creates feelings of romance and sometimes lust. Pink is a calm, soothing color that is also associated with love. Yellow is a cheery color that promotes warmth and happiness. However, prolonged exposure to yellow can cause anxiety. (This is why fast food restaurants use red and yellow in their decoration and logos. This causes people to eat more but to leave faster thus promoting to a larger turnover.) Orange strengthens concentration and gives people a creative boost. Blue is a calming color that reflects peace, healing, trust, intellect, and wisdom. Black is not a color associated with depression—it promotes feelings of power, sophistication, modernism, and elegance. Purple evokes feelings of nobility and healing. White represents purity, cleanliness, poise, and confidence. Brown is a color associated with the earth. It represents comfort and health and wellness. Grey is a color that represents precision, clarity, and sharpness. (more…)

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Restaurant Opening Checklist

Before you open a restaurant it’s important to have everything in order. When those doors open, it’ll be too late and you’ll get stuck on “putting out fires” instead of moving your business forward. For a smooth restaurant opening menus need to be set, ordered, the seating needs to be arranged, staff needs to be hired and prepped, etc.

To help you get a good start here’s a quick checklist of things to do before the grand opening:

  1. Create a menu. Before opening, the restaurant should offer certain types of food or cuisine. Some restaurants allow people to offer menu names on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. This is an easy way to outsource the task of naming items on the menu and a great way to publicize a grand opening. The menu should have, depending on your type of cuisine, appetizers, drinks, specials, main dishes, side items, desserts, and other courses if necessary. Depending on when you will be open, you should include breakfast and lunch sections. In one of our next posts we will discuss tips and ideas for creating successful menus.
  2. Arrange seating. The seating will depend on the size of the restaurant and the ambiance required. If it’s a laidback bar style, dining booths, bar stools and high-top tables are appropriate. If you have a patio, choose outdoor patio furniture that fits the desired atmosphere. For example, a country-style restaurant would have picnic tables instead of bistro tables for two. The walkways need to be wide enough for trays of food and people to pass by. You want to make seating comfortable, not cramped, so have tables and seats a set distance apart to allow people to get up and sit without disturbing one another. The tables should also be large enough for the plates, drinks, and flatware. Seating should be arranged in linear rows or a pattern which will make it easier for staff to work with, and more comfortable for customers as well. (more…)
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Kids Friendly Restaurant

Today when people are busy working all day long they feel like they have less time to spend as a family during the work week. This is why many families like to go out with their children for dinner. This way they are saving time preparing the meal at home and spending it with the kids while also letting the kids have a fun outing as a family.

But this means that the restaurants they choose to visit must be kids friendly.

So, what things would be found in a restaurant that was family oriented?

Firstly, ask yourself what would a family expect to get in such a restaurant.  What kind of seating outlay would there be?  It would have to have plenty of space in between the table, chairs and booths so that the parents can move freely between their place and their children. Also kids like to run around and move from place to place so needs to taken into account as well. And don’t have floors with carpets, it will get way too dirty. However if kids are able to freely run around then a soft  indoor-outdoor carpet should be used, as that is very easy to clean.

This is where the seating outlay would come in.  Try to plan out where the seating will go before putting anything in the place.  There should be a section for big families with loud kids and ones that are small and quiet.  Also think about using restaurant booths for a kid friendly atmosphere.  A mix of dining booths and restaurant chairs and tables is the optimal idea when trying to cater to a mixed crowed. (more…)

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Restaurant Furniture Design: Matchy-Matchy?

Time was, in fashion, everything had to match: hats and gloves, finger- and toenail polish, staying in color families. Then the trend progressed to coordinating—not matching exactly, but a more liberal approach: formerly unmatching colors grouped together, mixing prints with stripes, or big prints with small prints. Then came “whatever makes you happy”: a cheery eclecticism of “anything goes.”
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