The Problem. (now with photographic evidence!)

Let’s play a game.

See if you can guess what’s my all time, number one, with a bullet design peeve.

Wait. This will never work- too many of you already know. Okay, for the three people on the planet that don’t yet know, it’s when tables are too close together in restaurants. This makes me CRAZY. And in NYC, with over 31,000 restaurants and little space, it bothers me a LOT.

Right up front- I am passionate about food. I own and co-moderate one food community and I’m a moderator on another. I cook. A lot. I take photos of food. A lot. I am deeply passionate about restaurants and restaurant culture. Restaurant design is my favorite kind, because I get design and food in one shot. I read just as many food blogs as design and architecture blogs, and I read a lot of design and architecture blogs.

I am all about this whole restaurant thing, and I live in one of the single best places in the world to *be* all about the whole restaurant thing. When I *do* wind up with a residential project I would much prefer it be a kitchen, and more than that, be a kitchen for someone who is going to beat the holy hell out of it, too. Because I understand that mentality.

Last night, while I was toodling around Noah Kalina’s photography site, I was faced with The Problem.

Over.

 

And over.

 

 

…and over.

 

 

I understand, fully and without any question that the goal of a restaurant is to make money and that in order to do that successfully you are trying to make the maximum money per square foot/meter of space. I GET IT. I also understand fully and without any question that in a tight space you are trying to put as many tables in as possible in order to increase the amount of money per square foot/meter. Understood.

However the LAWS OF PHYSICS prevent people from being able to reform themselves into two dimensional objects with no thickness in order to be able to slip between tables that are placed this close together. There is *no way* to get in and out of these seating arrangements easily and cleanly. Not to mention it’s not just you. It’s your bag, or your purse, or your briefcase, or whatever you were carrying with you that day. Even a light jacket or sweater, which is not a bad thing to have on you in summer since a lot of restaurants are overly air conditioned.

At a *bare minimum*, ergonomically speaking, you need 18″ between each of those tables in order to be able to safely get in and out from behind them. I didn’t say comfortably. For that, you’re looking at a minimum of 24″. And if you honestly don’t know those numbers, I know you flunked design studio somewhere. Probably more than once, and you deserved it, too.

This doesn’t even begin to address that in these photographic examples, you’re practically sitting in the lap of the person adjacent to you on the banquette. Do you really want to overhear everything they say that badly, or vice versa? Being that close to adjacent diners screws with your sense of territoriality in a big way sometimes, particularly when it comes to putting things down like purses or bags or jackets. I’ve read countless stories of diners winding up at one another’s throats because of this issue. Is it *that hard* to pull one table out and separate the others to accommodate for the basic realities of physics? Just because your C of O says you CAN fit X amount of people into the space does it mean you have to *try*? I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t pay an extra few dollars for their meal (especially here in NYC- come on, we’re already paying a fortune anyway) just to not be breathing in the exhale of the people sitting next to them against the wall.

Don’t even *begin* to give me the song and dance about “people being bigger now”. Look at these (really illustrative) photos. People *were never* that small. And yet we continue to think that in restaurants the laws of physics are somehow not applicable. It’s NONSENSE.

Move the damned tables.

On an entirely unrelated note- If you’re reading DGD from a feed? If you comment on the *feed* I don’t get it in my mailbox. I will only ever see the comment if I just happen to catch it. If you want me to see the comment you have to do it at the original post (meaning here, at the DGD site proper.)

 

 

 

 

 

1 Comment

Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI