Tables, chairs and where people walk

Tables are where atmosphere stops being a feeling and starts being arithmetic. The room has a fixed number of seats, the groups that walk in have sizes you do not choose, and the gap between those two facts is either money you collect or money you watch walk out the door. This is also the topic where the cheapest fix in the whole course usually lives, because it is normally a matter of moving furniture rather than buying it.

🪑 Your tables against your actual parties

Count party sizes for two weeks — a mark on a sheet at the host stand is enough — and put them next to what the room offers. In the example restaurant, seventeen tables seat fifty: ten twos, six fours and one six. And here is what walks in, over roughly seven hundred groups a month:

More than half the groups are pairs and fewer than two-thirds of the tables are. On a Friday at nine the consequence is visible from the door: the room is "full" with people at every table and a dozen empty chairs in it, because pairs are sitting at fours and threes are sitting at fours with one seat spare. Those chairs are unsellable at the exact hour you have a queue.

The fix is almost never buying capacity. It is buying flexibility: square two-tops of a matching height that push together into a four, and two fours that push into an eight. Then the room reconfigures itself for whoever is at the door instead of asking the door to match the room. Two rules make it work: everything that might combine has to be the same height and the same style, and the floor plan needs a written map of which combinations are allowed, so a new host is not inventing geometry on a Friday.

How you then fill those tables — reservations, walk-ins, the waiting list, how long you hold a booking — is the reservations course. This one is about what is there to be filled.

🚧 The tables nobody wants

Every restaurant has two or three, and everybody who works there knows exactly which. By the toilet door, in the traffic lane to the kitchen, under the air conditioning, next to the station where the trays are stacked, or the lonely one in the middle of the room with nothing to lean against.

The usual practice is to seat them first, which is precisely backwards: the guest whose first experience of you is your worst table is the guest most likely never to return. Do one of three things with each of them instead. Fix it — a screen, a plant, a banquette back, moving the station, rehanging the door so it does not swing at the table. Repurpose it — a two instead of a four, a standing table, the place where the wine goes, the host's station. Or remove it, which sounds like losing capacity and often is not: a room with sixteen good tables outsells a room with seventeen where one is a punishment.

Then two habits. Sit at each of them for ten minutes on a busy night, which is the exercise from topic 1 aimed at a specific chair. And when a guest ends up there anyway, have the floor acknowledge it rather than pretend — a moved candle, a word, a small gesture — because a bad table with an apology is a story about service and a bad table in silence is a story about the restaurant.

📐 Space, and where people walk

Comfort at a table is mostly measurable too, and the numbers are boring and worth knowing, because a room that squeezes is felt by everybody and named by nobody.

• About 60 cm of table width per person for a normal meal, and never less than 45. Below that, plates and elbows compete and guests feel rushed for reasons they cannot articulate.
• 60 cm between the backs of chairs at neighbouring tables, so people can be seated without the room performing a dance.
• A main aisle of 90–120 cm where guests and staff both pass, and at least 60 for service-only routes.
• Nobody eats in a traffic lane. The path from the door to the toilets and the path from the kitchen to the room are the two worst neighbours a table can have; if a table is on one of them, it belongs in the previous section.
• Accessibility is not decoration: a step-free route in, a table a wheelchair can actually use, room to turn, and a bathroom that works. It is a legal requirement in most places, and long before that it is a guest you either can or cannot serve.
• Sightlines matter more than square metres. Corners, banquettes and anything with a back to a wall are the tables guests choose first — and a room with more of them feels bigger and calmer than a grid of freestanding tables in the same space.

One structural note worth its own line: banquettes are the most efficient furniture a restaurant can buy. They seat more people per metre than chairs, they absorb sound, they give every guest a back to lean against, and they let the table in front of them be any size you want. They cost more than chairs once and they earn it for a decade.

💺 The chair is a decision, and the terrace is a room

Chairs are chosen for their price and their looks, which are the two least important things about them. The important one is that a chair sets how long people stay, and that is a business decision either way. Hard, backless, upright seating turns tables and is right for a place doing volume at lunch; comfortable seating with a back and some give holds people through dessert and a second coffee, which is what a dinner restaurant lives on. The example restaurant does two and a half turns on a Friday and sells almost no dessert — those two facts and its chairs are related, and the sales analytics course is where the second one gets measured.

The terrace deserves saying out loud: it is not an overflow area, it is a second dining room that happens to have weather. It needs its own light after dark — the same warm, low, food-focused light from topic 2, not a floodlight — its own service path so staff are not crossing the whole room with plates, shade for the sun and a plan for wind, which ruins more terraces than rain does. It has its own noise problem in reverse: outdoor tables are usually louder for the neighbours than for the guests, and hours or volume limits are worth knowing before you invest rather than after a complaint.

And it is capacity that appears and disappears with the season, which is why it belongs in the budget as its own line — the budgeting course's example did exactly this with a patio adding twelve seats from spring. Seats you can only sell four months a year are still worth having; they are just not worth pretending are there in February.