Restaurant Construction: The Dining Experience
New World Design Builders has worked on a number of projects in the retail, residential, and nightlife, and hospitality space. No matter what space we’re designing, experience is an important facet of designing the location. However, there may be nowhere that experience is more precious than in restaurant construction in NYC.
Why is Restaurant Construction in New York is so Important?
We live in a tough economy as of writing this, and one of the first types of businesses to fall during times of economic recession or hardship are restaurants. Even in the case of a strong economy, operating a restaurant is not for the faint of heart. Margins are thin, repeat business is hard to come by, and simply getting people to try your restaurant out of the numerous other highly competitive restaurants out there is a herculean task.
Even if a restaurant offers the best food, meals, pricing, it can still lose out to many other inferior spaces. Why is that? We believe it is a matter of habit. Trying new restaurants is important, but if you look at your own life, you’ll recognize that there are many places we go to as a matter of habit—we like the location, the ambiance, the décor, the memories we’ve made there, etc.
The point we’re making is that while the culinary experience is the most important thing about a restaurant, the restaurant design experience is what draws people in and eases them into coming back.
The Most Important Aspects of Restaurant Construction in New York
Why does restaurant design translate to more customers? You might think it’s word of mouth, but it’s more like word of photo. In today’s world, people want to take pictures of their experience—their food, the restaurant, and of course themselves there to experience it.
Having a striking restaurant design is exactly the marketing you need to bring people to the table and keep coming back!
Restaurant design has many different facets to it:
- Color palette
- Choice of materials
- Architecture
- Lighting and choice of lights
- Seating style and arrangements
- Smell
- Acoustics
All of these are important to a restaurant’s design experience. The architecture governs the shape of the space and creates the greatest contribution to the overall tone of the environment. Will your restaurant be sleek and modern with clean lines and low profile?
Choice of materials also impact how customers feel. Stainless steel can be sleek, but also feel a bit alien and unwelcoming, which is why this modern staple is often toned down using other earthy materials or soft touches in the surrounding décor.
Space is also a function of the architecture and layout of the restaurant—how much space do diners have? There’s a fine line between a restaurant being too crowded and one that doesn’t feel communal enough.
Lighting is a crucial element to designing any space. Lighting serves different purposes in a venue, it can be used to for practical purposes—AKA task lighting, or it can serve no purpose other than to provide aesthetic, which is accent lighting. When people think of a romantic dinner they often picture a dimly lit restaurant with very warm lighting. That would be classified under ambient lighting, or how the overall tone of the lighting is—whether that be dim or bright.
Seating style and arrangements have made a divergence from the typical seating area and rows of tables and booths that many traditional restaurants had. Utilizing an unconventional floor plan and work with or against your design goals.
The hallmark of any restaurant that has been painstakingly designed is avoiding looks that feel very “stock” or typical of the space. Shaking up the seating design is one of the primary ways to make an impact when a customer walks in.
Paying heed to open space while not overly hurting your seating capacity is important for patrons of your establishment.
Acoustics are an underrated part of restaurant design. Have you ever been inside of a restaurant and the atmosphere was being ruined just by how noisy it was? We tend to think noisiness is just a product of the environment—people are speaking loudly, it’s busy, etc. But acoustics has a lot to do with it. If a restaurant has poor acoustics, noise will bounce off of the walls and create an echo chamber that holds much of the sound in.
For nightclubs, this can be an ideal characteristic, for restaurants, not so much.
However, if you think the solution is to simply create an environment that isn’t noisy, that would also be surprisingly not ideal. Largely, people go out to restaurants to have a nice meal and enjoy socializing with a significant other or friends. Having a bit of hustle and bustle in a restaurant really adds to the feeling that one is in a social environment.
So restaurant acoustics are a balancing act depending on the locale.
Restaurant Construction in New York City, NY
The décor and ambiance of your restaurant are crucial for your success in this highly competitive industry. New World Design Builders would love to discuss your restaurant building plans. For more information, contact New World Design Builders today.
