The tables have turned tightly packed
Skimping on personal space has many strangers dining too close for comfort
WASHINGTON— Several winters ago, Meagan Foster and her then-boyfriend were trying to turn a bad day around by venturing to the Tabard Inn in Washington for drinks and dinner. But when she tried to navigate the sliver of space between her table and the next, Foster says, she bumped everything — votive, water, silverware — off both of them, and promptly burst into tears.
The incident didn’t scar her for life; the Washington resident and her boyfriend were later married at the Dupont Circle spot. But whenever they go back, they make sure to avoid the banquettes, or what she called the “booth tables,” along one wall.
She’s not the only diner tired of playing ballet dancer or contortionist (in my case, sucking in my gut) for the privilege of a meal away from home. To access some of the more tightly packed tables, anyone who’s not a string bean is forced to enter seats sideways, sometimes on tiptoe, and invade a neighbour’s space one of two ways: by butt or by crotch. Inadvertent fat shaming ensues.
Like airlines, restaurants seem to be trimming personal space in an attempt to pack in more customers, and this at a time when the average man and woman are 30 and 26 pounds heavier, respectively, than they were in 1960. (That’s 196 and 166 pounds.) Whoever came up with the Knee Defender, the gadget that prevents airline seats from reclining, might contemplate its equivalent for cramped restaurants, because diners would likely snap it up. A Zagat survey from two years ago found that “crowds” ranked just behind service, noise and prices as a chief complaint among restaurant-goers.
The average two-top table (or “deuce” in industry jargon) measures 60 to 74 centimetres, says Stephani Robson, a senior lecturer at the School of Hotel Administration at Cornell University who specializes in restaurant design psychology. There’s no industry standard (or fire code) for distance between tables, but Robson considers 40 cm a good minimum at banquettes, where space is usually tightest. “Your guests will thank you for it,” she says.
The stakes are high. Aaron Allen, a global restaurant consultant, says a 40-seat restaurant that can fit in “just one more four-top has increased their capacity — and revenue capacity — by 10 per cent.” Mike Friedman, a co-owner of All-Purpose, thinks his restaurant’s intimate seating promotes a “convivial nature” in keeping with its Italian-American theme. While he could have squeezed more tables in, Friedman says he didn’t, because they would have disrupted server flow and taxed the small kitchen. The restaurateur also says that removing even a single table would mean saying arrivederci to “hundreds of thousands of dollars” a year.
The sense of crowdedness has been exacerbated in recent years by chefs and diners themselves. Blame the former for blanketing tables with small plates, menus the size of posters and flights of food and drink. Patrons, meanwhile, are unloading on the table everything including laptops and smartphones (because you never know when you might need to snap some food porn). Rising interest in European concepts brings with them more-intimate seating.
Take the Spanish-themed Joselito, where owner Javier Candon says he wanted to evoke “Old World café” charm when he opened in January. Aiming to re-create the feel of Seville and Madrid, he bought small tables and set them so close that servers bumped into one another, silverware routinely fell to the floor and at least one chicken consommé created an oily slick when a diner bumped into a tray holding the broth. Candon ended up removing two tables.
“For those that are uncomfortable about the shrinking personal space we once enjoyed,” Allen says via email, “we’ll have to remind ourselves this is the new normal and pretend we’re Parisian.”
Age, sex and geography, Robson says, influence tolerance levels. Older women, she thinks, are more sensitive to being wedged into a dining room than their younger counterparts, due partly to diminished hearing. (Witness how some restaurants make a show of offering the inside seat to a woman by pulling a table out to let her slip into her seat — where she’s entombed until she needs to get up again.) In high-rent, high-density cities such as New York, locals are less bothered by restaurant confines than outsiders.
In a 2009 study in a New York restaurant, the recently closed Public in SoHo, Robson found that diners spent less time and less money at seats that were close together. Cus- tomers with 30 cm between tables stayed an average of 110 minutes and spent 73 cents a minute. Those with 15 cm between tables stayed an average of 102 minutes and spent 66 cents a minute. The study didn’t explore overall economic effect, but as Robson said, “In a restaurant with a lot of demand, the goal is to turn tables quickly. Putting them close together accomplishes that.”
Designers find themselves trying to serve two masters: restaurant owners eager to maximize floor space and diners who might enjoy some elbow room — or not, says architect Herb Heiserman, managing principal with Streetsense. “Not everybody looks for a private zone,” he says. Some diners see restaurants as an extension of their families, he adds, and don’t mind the closeness.
Design-wise, banquettes give restaurants the greatest amount of flexibility, allowing them to easily push tables together or pull them apart to accommodate different party sizes. For patrons seeking privacy, full booths are popular, given their physical barriers to other diners. One way designers can make up for the lack of privacy is to use objects such as table lamps, props that establish boundaries, however small.
“Our No. 1 goal with design is to create a fun environment,” says Jeffrey Lefcourt, founder and managing partner of the Smith in Washington, a New York import where the small tables and tight seating practically allow neighbouring diners to taste one another’s food. Instead of looking at each table as if a price tag were attached, he prefers to view seating as a social enhancer. The formula seems to be working: Diners have sent his company photos of strangers who have become friends in his restaurants.
Anyone who’s not a string bean is forced to enter seats sideways, sometimes on tiptoe, and invade a neighbour’s space one of two ways: by butt or by crotch