Restaurants are Illusionists

The purpose of restaurant designers are to create a foundational design meant to draw in potential customers. The key to a successful restaurant is the use of subtle tricks and psychologically researched design choices made to attract clientele and keep them coming back. Restaurants have three main areas that the customer experiences and needs to be perfect. The most important is the menu, followed by the restaurant appearance, and finally the physical layout. Each of these three parts are vital to a restaurant's potential for success because they all work together to create the perfect image to draw in future customers.

The menu is perhaps the most important part of any restaurant. Every single restaurant has one and every visit includes one. The purpose of a menu is to tell the customer their food options and how much they cost as quickly as possible. Gregg Rapp, a professional menu engineer, has contributed to Janie Kliever’s article on the best hacks for menu design. “One of the biggest problems in menu design is that on average, a customer will only spend 1 minute and 49 seconds reading their menu (Kliever)”. For this reason, menu designers must analyze their target audience’s reading patterns. This means putting the best and most expensive dishes where the readers eyes will pass over the most. Menu designers have to understand the clients’ strongest menu choices and most expensive items, so they can place those choices at the tops and bottoms of food lists, because that is statistically where our eyes read the most. Another very important part of the design is the theme of the menu, which must adhere to the same concept as the restaurant for aesthetic purposes. Finally, the designers will sprinkle in some sneaky psychologically appealing tricks to keep the customer looking at the expensive menu items. One will notice almost every single good restaurant does this through arrows and ribbons, extremely appetizing images of the food, and highlighting the most or second most expensive thing on the menu to make is seem better than the others and worth the buy. Every feature of the menu designed in this fashion to promote the restaurant. All of these ingredients collage together for the ideal menu in any restaurant employing these methods.

The arguably second most important part of a successful restaurant is the restaurant appearance. This includes lighting, wallpaper, the materials, the color scheme, and more. According to Tom Strother, a co-founder of an established interior design firm, the most important aspect of restaurant appearance is the lighting. “...It has to be soft and flattering to make guests feel comfortable so that they are confident and relaxed and enjoy their stay in the restaurant. We tend to do this through soft ambient lighting to complement the more targeted architectural lighting and also to suit the time of day. (Gander).” Different basic lighting techniques have different psychological effects on any customer. This reaction can actually be tested and then applied in different settings through mass experimentation. What one does is test 100 volunteers with different stimuli and have them rate them. This creates a clear percentage of how popular the stimuli is. The psychological reaction to different stimulants works with wallpaper, furniture comfort level, testing restaurant impressions, etc. All of the restaurant appearance choices are considered when constructing the restaurant.

The last, but not least major aspect of restaurant design is the physical layout. This is how the tables, chairs, restroom, kitchen, host/hostess stand, and basically anything decorative are arranged. Chris LaBan, a professional restaurant critic, includes a description of one great example of a random restaurant showing how the physical layout influences a customer's perception. “With sleek glass walls folded up for al fresco dining and an airy dining room outfitted in woody Nordic chic, this ambitious corner restaurant-bar in West Philly's new Study boutique hotel gives University City a handsome all-purpose destination for a stylish New American meal.” The way that every part of the restaurant looks gives the restaurant something of a theme. In this case, the theme was New American or modern eating. This restaurant categorizing is very important for customers because they have options, and they like those options to be clear. Physical layout dictates the atmosphere of the restaurant.