Cafe Reality Buyer’s Guide: Cafe Furniture

When opening a café or bistro, one of the biggest investments that you are going to have to make and probably one of the most crucial decisions is the cafe furniture. This is because they are the defining features in a café/bistro/restaurant. There are a number of things that you need to think about before purchasing your furniture and below is a guide of the things you need to think about in order to create the perfect café environment.

Before you even think about what type of café furniture you are going to purchase, you need to think about how many people you are going to fit in the restaurant. One way of working this out is the Metric Handbook theory. The handbook suggests that each diner requires between 1 and 2 square meters of space and a width of 580mm around a table. Depending on the type of restaurant depends on how crowded the café/restaurant will be. For example a crowded restaurant that is consisting of small tables, then the space in between the cafe tables is going to be less than that of a fine dining restaurant. Another tip for increasing covers in a restaurant is to arrange the tables at 45o angles from each other; this should be thought about when drawing up plans for the restaurant.

When in use, the average café chair extends to about 450mm from the table's edge and there should also be another 450mm gap between the gaps of the chairs so that customers and staff can walk around the restaurant floor comfortably.

The table sizes will vary from 600mm diameter which is recommended for those cafes that serve coffee and snacks whereas for restaurants that offer the full dining experience then the tables should be at least 700mm for two people.

There quite a few cafe furniture dealers out there that will help you to design your area to maximise space for a small charge and some such as Café Reality will do this for free as well as give you further advice on the type of furniture to buy.

Now you are ready to look at purchasing your furniture. For more information on purchasing the furniture please visit out other buyer's guides.