6 Essential Tips for Making a Restaurant Floor Plan

Many people will do a lot of preparation before opening a restaurant or gourmet store, especially for the decoration design, they will refer to the design of many other stores and find a professional design team to customize their own store. Few customers focus on restaurant floor plans, but the configuration of seating, bar and kitchen areas can have a huge impact on how customers experience space and how efficiently employees move through the space during service.

A well-designed restaurant floor plan can improve a restaurant's profit margin by allowing services to move between the front and back offices faster, serving customers more efficiently and turning tables faster. New employees will also need to refer to the restaurant's floor plan when they go to work to familiarize themselves with the store's layout. It's an essential tool for day-to-day operations and well worth your time. In this article, you will learn:

• What is a restaurant floor plan?
• Why do restaurants need floor plans?
• Who designs the restaurant floor plan?
• When should you create a restaurant floor plan?
• The restaurant floor plan must've

Now let's start it!

• What is a restaurant floor plan?

A restaurant floor plan is a blueprint for drawing the entire restaurant layout. It shows the distances and relationships between rooms, tables, service and waiting areas, cashiers, bars, etc. Also shown are the locations of fixtures such as water heaters, doors, electrical outlets and various appliances.

• Why do restaurants need floor plans?

A restaurant floor plan is an important tool that helps service staff like waiters, hosts, barracks, and bartenders orient themselves, the customers they serve, and the tools they need to do their job. It also helps new hires understand the restaurant space: where the waiting area, bar, dining area, prep area, kitchen, storage, restrooms, and dish pit are located.

The floor plan of the store can also give you a better understanding of the decoration layout in the store, and let you know whether the facilities in the store meet the needs of your business during the design stage.

• Who designs the restaurant floor plan?

Hiring a professional architect and interior designer with experience in the restaurant industry is usually a very worthwhile investment. Your restaurant floor plan needs to take building codes and regulations into account, and a professional who already understands them is unlikely to make a costly mistake.

Architects are trained to ensure that the restaurant is structurally sound, while interior designers are trained to design a beautiful, functional space within those regulations. That's why we recommend hiring both when designing your restaurant interior. Together, they can help you turn your vision into reality.

You can also find a direct selling factory like our ANT DISPLAY that can provide you with custom store design services and can also produce according to your custom designs. We have done a lot of store projects, not only have our own professional design team but also have a very good understanding of store design points, as well as experienced workers.

Both architects and interior designers should have the following skills, you can use the following to find a suitable designer：

• Have a solid understanding of space planning (depending on their level of experience.)
• Stay up-to-date on building codes and regulations in your state or province.
• Able to use professional grade design software and very experienced.
• Have the foresight to solve problems and spot and fix red flags before they become bigger problems.
• Linked up with manufacturers of tables, seating, storage, counter space and lighting.
• Comprehensive knowledge of materials, furniture and finishes.
• Intrinsic creativity and knowledge gained through experience can help you turn ideas into reality.

• When should you create a restaurant floor plan?

If you haven't found the right store, you won't be able to create an accurate floor plan. Therefore, restaurant floor plans usually start when you successfully lease a commercial restaurant space. Once you've finalized which space to open your store in, either you or a designer you've hired can start creating the floor plan of the restaurant.

• Essential elements of a restaurant floor plan

When you start designing your restaurant floor plan, make sure it includes the following elements of the restaurant section:

1. Kitchen
2. Dining area
3. Checkout and POS Systems
4. Entrance and waiting area
5. Bar counter
6. Restrooms
   

1.Kitchen layout and size depend on the type of food prepared and the volume of business. Open kitchens — where watching chefs prepare food can be a form of entertainment — have become increasingly popular in recent years. You also need to consider where your kitchen staff receives orders that are sent to the Kitchen Display System (KDS) through the point-of-sale system. Ideally, the KDS is placed in an area that is easily accessible by kitchen staff and minimizes kitchen foot traffic - a window is a good place (this is restaurant slang for the heating area between the kitchen and the serving station. This is where the chefs place Where the dishes are ready to run to the table.)

2.Generally, the dining area, bar, restroom and waiting area of ​​a restaurant should occupy about 60% of its total area, and the remaining 40% should be reserved for the kitchen, pantry, and food preparation space. You will also need to consider local building codes. What is the maximum number of people that can be accommodated in the building? When designing your dining area, you need to consider how your customers and employees will pass through it - designing to avoid any bottlenecks. Also, make sure your dining space is flexible enough to accommodate large gatherings. The use of hard or soft materials in the dining area can affect the acoustics and overall ambiance of the space.

3.The checkout andPOS system is the heartbeat of your restaurant, the tool that the server uses to place orders and deliver them to the kitchen, accept payments, check-in reservations, and more. Dining areas in restaurants have limited space; tableside ordering prevents unnecessary foot traffic from servers running back and forth between tables and payment stations and saves dining space previously allocated to fixed payment stations.

4.Entrance and waiting areas are often a customer's first impression of a restaurant, and the way it's configured can have unintended consequences. While the restaurant's kitchen should take up 40% of the total area, the dining area, bar, restrooms, entrance and waiting areas should be taken out of the 60% of the space allocated to the dining space. If space is too limited for seating at your entrance, consider directing guests to the bar to wait for their table and have a drink.

5.Not all restaurants have bars, but when they do, they often become the main attraction of the space.

6.Restrooms are a necessary part of a restaurant layout, but ideally, bathroom doors should be away from the dining area. Restroom and kitchen areas are strategically placed near each other so that they all use the same plumbing. As you should with your entire restaurant layout, it's important to comply with the ADA's accessibility regulations. Also, familiarize yourself with your local regulations on how many restrooms and gender designations your restaurant needs. In some cases, small restaurants (restaurants with fewer than 24 seats) may not require restrooms for guests.

• Ending

The graphic design of a restaurant requires careful consideration to find the right balance of efficiency, and aesthetics while sticking to a budget. Take the time to work with professionals to build a solid foundation and build long-term success for your business.