A restaurant is still a place to connect

A restaurant is a place to be with other people. That is the oldest reason to go to one, and it is the one most at risk right now.

What changed

Restaurants are under pressure. Food and labor costs are each up about 35 percent since 2019, and full-service restaurants ran on a profit margin of about 2.8 percent last year. [1] Many operators have answered by cutting service. In a lot of places now the guest does everything except cook: orders at a kiosk, collects the food, finds a seat and clears the table.

There is nothing wrong with a kiosk. About two in three guests say they are comfortable using one [1], and some days you want to eat without talking to anyone. But when the service goes, something else often goes with it: the person who saw you come in.

What a restaurant is for

The sociologist Ray Oldenburg called places like this third places: the cafés, bars and other hangouts, apart from home and work, where people gather informally and often. [2] Nicholas Lander ran a restaurant before he reviewed them for the Financial Times, and he wrote a book arguing that the restaurateur, more than the chef, makes a restaurant what it is. [3]

We read both the same way. People come for each other and for the welcome as much as for the food. The way the front of house works has shifted. It doesn’t have to disappear.

A room that still hosts

With fewer staff on the floor, the room has to do more of the hosting, and it has to help the staff who are there do the rest. We plan for both.

• The staff who are there can still host. From where they work they can see the door, reach every table and have time to talk.

• The room shows you where to go. You should not have to work out where to stand, where to order or where to wait. More on that first minute in The Invisible Threshold.

• You can find your own way. A guest who has never been in should be able to get from the door to a seat without being told how.

• The light and the noise stay low enough for conversation. That means no wall of big bright screens. More on light and sound in What makes a space feel like it was designed for you?

A guest who is not working out what to do next can relax and pay attention to the people they came with.

The order a guest uses it

We plan the room in the order a guest uses it: arrive, order, sit, stay, leave. We call that the scene sequence. At each step we ask what the guest sees, hears and has to do, and what a member of staff has to do to make that step work.

We also ask who the room lets in, and how long it lets them stay. That question has a long history, and we wrote about it in Who gets a seat?

What we are aiming for

An elegant place you want to bring your friends back to, and come back to yourself, again and again.