Some Thoughts On Restaurant Interior Design

Once again I’m returning to you from out of town, this time from the Finger Lakes of NY, where I was catching up with all the old college friends and running in the cross country team’s alumni race. One of the best things about Ithaca, NY, is the volume and variety of its restaurants — I’ve been told Ithaca has the United States’s highest number of restaurants per capita, though I have no idea whether there’s any truth to that. This weekend, though, I tried someplace new — Saigon Kitchen, the Vietnamese restaurant with some of the best faux-Chinese General’s Chicken I’ve ever tasted.

Strip malls are ubiquitous and usually ugly — good interior design, however, can really make a business stand out to consumers like me.

Like many college town restaurants, Saigon Kitchen’s dining area is just one room, narrow and stuffed with tables, with the kitchen behind another door in the back. And yet, it looked really classy. Brightly lit, both warm-feeling and neutrally colored, with large, theme-appropriate, prints and paintings adorning the walls. Surprisingly nice, much the same way my favorite sushi place at home is just a dull strip mall restaurant until you walk inside, where it’s elegantly decorated and classy looking. All-in-all, a welcoming environment compared to some of its competitors, where I’m more likely to order takeout to avoid sitting in the dingy interiors to eat my meal. Though this might merely show a personal taste for Asian interior design that I’m just now noticing,  I think it also illustrates the value of a well decorated restaurant — for some reason, a restaurant that surprises me (and by extension, other consumers) with its sense of style and well-maintained appearance is endearing. You walk into a place for something delicious, then you leave thinking, “Wow, that place was nice.”

All this leaves me with questions about restaurant design and decoration, something that we’ve covered on this blog in the past. I’m going to revisit these topics this week, taking the time to go through the latest and greatest ideas and materials I can find and bringing it to you, so that you too can optimize your restaurant’s decorating and design scheme affordably. If restaurants in a college town with high rent, small dining rooms, and low (student friendly) prices can manage their interiors wonderfully in this difficult economic climate, we all can. This week, we’ll find out how.

Check back on Wednesday for some information on the subject. Until then, contact us here.