Restaurant Design

When you’re in a restaurant, it’s likely that you have at least a passing interest in eating healthy.  Design can help you do just that. If you are designing a new space for an “eatery” then these tips will be very useful for you! Why not forward to a friend who has a hotel, cafe or restaurant, they’ll find some tips in here that will be enhance their offering!

Space design can’t guarantee that you’ll be able to resist the luscious brownies that your neighbour brings by, but the environment inside your home can help you resist the call of extra calories.  If your issue is not situations where people eat too much but when they consume too little, design can help you encourage eating also.

First thing to think about is how surface colours do indeed influence our appetite. 

Looking at warm colours boosts our appetite, while seeing cooler ones has the opposite effect.  Looking at warm colours has positive social repercussions—doing so encourages us to behave in more social ways.  You may need to weigh appetite and social effects against each other to make a colour decision that serves your at-home needs most comprehensively.

If you serve lots of healthy food and want to enhance that message, then consider colouring the eating spaces with relatively more cool or warm colours.

If people who will be eating in a space you’re working on are likely to be trying to eat a little less, put cool colours on the walls, in any upholstery or wall coverings, or other surfaces.  At your local paint store, pick blues and greens, or cool beiges, for example.  An advantage of using greens:  seeing shades of green supports creative performance, so if you work in the dining area while you’re not dining there, green can be a good option.  Another green benefit, in a green space, with a creative boost you might have a brainwave about something challenging you at work or at home.

If someone is lacking appetite paint the breakfast nook in your kitchen a warm colour, go crazy with the warm shades in other spaces where people will eat.  This means you’ll be selecting colours such as oranges, peaches, and warm beiges for places people will be eating. We’re also likely feel a little warmer while we’re in areas with warmer colours predominating; that temperature effect can be particularly significant for people dining alone who are apt to feel colder (literally) than those eating with others. So if you have a lot of solo travellers in your restaurant, you might want to create a welcoming “warmer” nook just for them.

So how about lighting?

When light is warmer, we linger, particularly if other people are present and that can lead to eating more—lingering can, insidiously, lead to “calorie intake creep;” warm light boosts our appetite.  Warmer light creates an atmosphere that’s great for relaxing and mingling, and as a species one of the things that we really enjoy doing together is eating, so it’s no surprise that warmer light, the sort produced by candles or light bulbs labelled “warm” can be paired with eating a little more than planned or intended.

Cooler lights help us concentrate when we’re working and to eat a little less when foods nearby. Lights effects on work can be particularly useful if when you’re not eating in your dining area, you’re doing your job there.

It’s likely that in any room you’ll find that a mix of warm and cool lights work best.  We respond more strongly to warmer lights when they’re in table top or floor lamps or mounted relatively low on walls and to cooler lights when they’re overhead, and positioning your warm and cool light bulbs accordingly is likely to work best for you.

We eat a little more when the light in the space we’re in is a little dimmer, and less and more healthfully when it’s brighter—which makes those candlelight dinners, unfortunately, bad for your waist line.

What to look at?

Even the art that we look at as we eat influences how much we consume.  If you’re looking at a sculpture of a very thin person,you’re likely to eat less than if you’re looking at something else.

We’re more apt to make healthy eating choices when looking at images of nature than when we’re not.

The fact that humans are a social species, and social eaters, has all sorts of ramifications.  First, it means whenever we can eat with others, we take pleasure in doing so and generally with while-eating conversations—any place in your home that you’ll be eating while mingling should be equipped with enough seats of the same type so that the heads of everyone eating will be at about the same height above the floor.  This objective is achieved if everyone sits on the model chair, or chairs whose legs are all about the same length, even if the people talking are actually different heights when they stand up.  What needs to be avoided is some people sitting in seats where the seat itself, known at the seat pan, is much closer to the floor than others.  Research consistently shows that when we look up at people, we think of them as more “adult-like”, for instance, as being experienced and competent, while people who get looked down onto are seen as childlike, less experienced, and less competent.  These adult-child categorizations harm communication among people who are actually peers.

Dining tables where everyone can see everyone else’s eyes will encourage a free flow of communication among equal-status diners, but many dining areas are the wrong size or shape of accommodate a round table that seats more than just a couple of people.  Square tables, like round tables, allow for good eye contact without anyone sitting at the head or the foot of a table, with the corresponding status-related designation as the “head-of-the-table.”  Square tables are often no easier to place in a dining area than round ones.

Furnishing

Make sure that all dining chairs have cushions, even the removable tie on types.  We get along much better with other people when we’re sitting on even slightly cushioned seats than when we’re on hard surfaces—and that can be particularly handy during family political debates over holiday meals.

Clutter ups stress, so managing visual clutter levels, as discussed in this article, can be an important way to cut tension-related eating.  So keep your dining area clutter free.

You’ll want to consider how your heating and air conditioning system is likely to move smells through your home as you design for dining.  If it consistently distributes the delicious scents of dinner cooking through your home, creating opportunities for them to linger and encourage future snacking, a re-do may be in order.  Research has shown that the smell of coffee is energizing so if you want a quick through put of lively customersm then put the coffee on!

When you’re considering building that dining booth, keep in mind that we seem to eat more healthy foods when more people can see us than we do when tucked away in a booth, at least in restaurants; more secluded dining options may not be as good for the people in your home as more visible ones.  We are, however, apt to have a more pleasant eating experience when people aren’t walking directly behind us as we eat, for example, there may be a short wall or some plants between us and them—we still have a primordial fear of being attached from behind while we’re doing something such as eating that diverts some of our energy from looking for developing dangerous situations in the world around us.  We especially enjoy having a view around us, of a natural landscape, for example, as we eat.  This prospect (or view) combined with the feeling of security leads to the profoundly comforting condition of prospect and refuge, also discussed here.

Music, shapes and food…

Choose the music that you play at dinner parties, or during meals everyday, carefully.  The more we like the soundscape as we eat, the more positive our opinions are of whatever we’re consuming.  Also, we tend to consume in coordination with what we hear—a French sounding song encourages us to buy French wine, for example.

Interestingly, we also link particular shapes and tastes and the forms of dishes that you serve food from or eat from can influence your perceptions of what you are tasting, according to the research evidence.  We link more angular shapes with bitter and sour tastes as well as sharp tastes (an example: cheddar cheese).  Similarly, curving shapes are associated with sweeter tastes and smooth, creamy textures. Angular shapes/forms are also linked to spiciness.  Want people to think your chili is mind-blowingly spicy?  Serve it from a dish with a spiky, starburst rim.

Specific, in restaurant research has shown that we’re more likely to eat healthy food in a restaurant when we’re sitting at a high table, not sitting in a booth, are located closer to a window, are further from any TV that’s playing, when we can see all the offerings of a buffet before we begin to make choices, when we don’t have a good view of the buffet from where we’re sitting—and we drink more alcohol when we’re sitting within two tables of the bar.