When you want to go out and enjoy a fine French dinner for your
anniversary, you often have a certain type of restaurant in mind. Someplace with fine silverware, stuffy
waiters, soft lighting, an elegant atmosphere. So walking into a French restaurant that looks like it used to be a
Southern BBQ shack, complete with smiling pigs and farmyard paraphernalia would
probably not go over well. This is just
an example of why the right ambience and setting is as important as the food
for many restaurants.

Fine
Furnishings to Set the Mood
An important and oft overlooked aspect of the dining experience is the
very table diners sit at to enjoy their meals, as well as the restaurant chairs
or booths they sit in. Sitting on a
bench, or old fashioned wooden chair may work for a BBQ restaurant, but diners
in a Moroccan restaurant would more likely prefer the traditional cushions and
reclining as opposed to more traditional restaurant tables and booths.

The key is tying together your décor and ambience with the cuisine you
offer. Creating the right atmosphere
will greatly enhance your customer’s experience and take a restaurant from just
a place to grab a quick bite to an experience that will have them coming back
repeatedly for more.

Hurry
Up and Wait
It’s Friday evening, you just got off of work and you are taking your
significant other out to dinner for a much-deserved date night. You get to the restaurant and see that there
is a bit of a crowd and your heart sinks a little, no one likes to wait, do
they? The host or hostess takes your
name, and you try to find somewhere to pass the time while waiting to be
seated.

The wait is generally not a favorite experience of diners. While it
means that the restaurant is doing good business, a long wait time can actually
turn customers away. One way some
restaurants attempt to alleviate the waiting situation is to offer a
comfortable seating area, either inside the entrance or just outside of it,
complete with restaurant tables and chairs for their guests to use while they
wait. Some locations even offer drink or
appetizer services to their guests in an attempt to lessen the impact of the
wait, and to give them a sampling of what is to come. So if you were a diner waiting an hour for a
table, and you were faced with a choice between standing outside in the cold,
waiting to be called, or finding a comfortable seat with tables and comforts,
which would you choose?

The
Comforts of Home
While we go out to eat to get away from home, we still want to have that
comfortable feeling. Sitting on a hard,
awkwardly positioned chair is not going to improve anyone’s dining
experience. In Ancient Greece and Rome,
diners would recline on couches with cushions while partaking of their meals,
and that is still a common practice in many cultures, such as the Bedouins of
North Africa. That type of seating can,
in fact, be found in many Moroccan and North African and Levantine-cuisine
restaurants.

One need not fill their
restaurant with couches and cushions, however. If you were dining out in a fine Italian restaurant, you would not
expect to sit reclining on a couch, even if their Roman ancestors did so. Soft lighting, a restaurant table adorned
with a Chianti bottle holding a candle, and comfortable
chairs would suffice in that scenario. The point is to make your guests comfortable. You want them to enjoy their meal, but you
also don’t want them having to see a chiropractor once they leave.