Social and Commercial Dining – The Rules

You’ve found the perfect dining table and chairs, the dining room table looks every inch an extract from one of those good home magazines, and the candles add the final touch, creating the right mood for your dinner party. Guests arrive and are met by a canapé and wine reception, when everyone is gathered; you guide your guests to the dining table..from then on in it all goes horribly wrong. There is not enough space around the table for guests to pull out and get under it, eventually they manage but your guests now resemble sardines rather then the magazine extract you had planned. This could have been avoided if we had just followed the ‘Rules of Dining’.

Now obviously these are not strict guidelines, they bare room for a little flexibility, for instance to squeeze in that extra person who didn’t RSVP, so you had no idea they were coming, but they are guidelines all the same, to help you achieve the most from your dining experience.

Choosing the Right table: – The table should be 750mm in height, allowing room from the slightest to the most robust guest. So chairs should be around 450mm high at the seat.

Choose Numbers: – Each diner requires 600 mm to eat comfortably, whilst leaving 100mm between each person to avoid any stray elbows landing in soups.

For four persons dining, a square/circular dining table is ideal for creating the right level of dining intimacy and gives enough room for all. For six plus , you should look at rectangular tables, the standard length of these dining tables is 1200 mm, many come with folding leaves so are easily extending to fit all guests comfortably. We suggest the Innocence Dining Table for four diners and the Lenda Classic Dining Table for six diners or more.

Choose the Area: – You will need to keep at least 600mm free space around your dining room table to allow easy access in and out. So for a square dining table measuring 1200mm x 1200mm, a space of 3600 mm sq is required.

Commercial Dining

Every restaurateur knows the importance of a restaurant layout and you only get one chance to get it right. There are many important factors to consider but top of the list is – layout. It is crucial to get the right spacing, leaving enough room for your waitress to manoeuvre comfortably for both them and diners, around the dining tables and to and from the kitchen.

The space needed around the tables is slightly more than standard dining, this is to allow for the flow of traffic between the tables and give each tables its own level of privacy. The distance around each table should be 900mm for comfortable dining.

Which Table to serve what? : – Dependant on which cuisine style your restaurant is serving, will be a deciding factor on the different level of space required by individual diners, a diner in a coffee shop requires less room than someone in a restaurant having a three course meal.