Everything starts with an empty room.
FF&E and SOE stand for “Furniture, Fittings & Equipment” and “Small Operating Equipment”.
When you open a new restaurant, you start with an empty room.
Once you find a location, you will immediately try to figure out how many guests you can house.
But you have to make a lot of decisions. You cannot just start with the square footage and divide it by the size of a table. It does not work like that. But I think that is clear to everybody.
What else do you need to set up a restaurant, next to tables and chairs?
- Wardrobe – When you enter a restaurant, bar or café, you will find a wardrobe where you can hang up your coat or leave your bags
- Hostess table – with a speaker’s desk – on it you will find a reservation book and a phone or any digital system with a table plan to organise and check reservations and manage walk-ins and menus
- Children’s area – a playground with soft flooring, toys, a person for child care (for family-friendly restaurants)
- Cashier desk – for payments, invoicing, cash handling, selling vouchers, souvenirs
- Waiter stations – sideboards for cutlery, menus, cruets, condiments, napkins and a till
- Clearing stations
- Dance floor and a stage for entertainment
- Staff area – changing facilities and a common room for breaks
- Offices – team secretary, accounting
- Restrooms
- Storage – beverages, food, equipment, linen, office supplies
- Brewery – fermentation tanks, storage tanks
- VIP – Area
- Dispense bar or Bar area – Beverage dispenser, beer tap, shelves for glasses, cups, glasswasher, coffee machine, coffee cups, cooling devices (fridge, freezer, ice cube and crushed ice maker), blender, cocktail area and equipment. And a guest area with bar stools
- Decoration – pictures, paintings, lamps, flowers, displays, showcases
When you look at the available space now, you will see it could be just 70% of the allocated space remaining for guest areas. And now, last but not least, you can think of tables and chairs.
Also take into account the shape of the room – that there might be any inconvenient corners, niches, pillars, or walls that could be inclined at a certain angle that cannot be used for guest areas. Plus, you need passageways for the service and, of course, for the guests. Eventually, you can figure out how many tables and chairs fit in.
To sum it up: for a Restaurant with 300 sqm, deduct 30% for support areas, leaving 200 sqm of available space. When you put the tables in straight rows, you will end up with 32 table sets of 4 pax, because you will need 6,25 sqm per table.
Straight set up + service space 250 cm – 6,25 sqm (straight) – 32 table sets of 4 pax
Diagonal set up + service space 200 cm – 4 sqm (diagonal) – 50 table sets of 4 pax
Diagonal vs Straight
That is the worst-case scenario. But there is also a best case scenario.
If you have no brewery like in my example, no live music, no dance floor, and you put the tables diagonally, you could fit almost 100 tables for 400 guests. That sounds much better. Right?
And if you open a Bar or nightclub for mixed purposes, you will need different metrics for your space allocation.
I can tell you that furnishing a restaurant requires a lot of thinking, planning and organising. Out of experience, I suggest that you sit with your key personnel – the head chef, the restaurant and the bar manager and talk it through. This is also advisable because the requirements for the different departments might not be the same. This is even more important for the next subject.
RESTAURANT SET UP “SOE” – Small Operating Equipment
Plates – Bowls – Ramekins – Cups – Glasses – Cutlery – Crockery – Cruets – Napkins – Coasters – Decoration. This list is not complete.
The amount of SOE needed is often underestimated. It will be loads of cutlery, crockery, glasses and much more.
Do not forget the fluctuation of equipment and how much you need to bring in circulation – clean, dirty, in use, ready for plating, storage. Also remember that breakage happens in busy, high-volume operations and during peak times.
In modern kitchens at high-level restaurants, most head chefs wish to have representable plates, which means very large ones so that they can present the dishes in a very attractive way. That is understandable on one hand, and on the other hand, you must consider that plates still have to be served.
A waiter should still be capable of carrying 3 to 4 plates at once, unless you run an exclusive high-level restaurant.
You can use plateaus (large service trays). Then the waiter can load several plates onto the plateau and bring it to the table. But there you need space to put it down and serve the plates. Alternatively, you can structure the service so two waiters serve. One would carry the tray the second one serves.
It is a dance on a razor blade- either the service needs more space, or it is labour intensive. The third option would be to agree on a plate size that can be served manually and is representable enough for the dishes.
Besides the design and the price, please bear the following in mind
- Robust – sturdy, breaking strength, not unbreakable
- Stackable – for storage, when you pile it up in the kitchen for preparation works
- Multiple usage – soup plate vs soup bowl, can be used for salad or other snacks
- No metal in design such as gold Logo (microwave safe)
- Size, weight, shape (triangle, oval)
- Glasses – baskets, racks, storing, washing (hight breakage)
- Cutlery – solid, sharp knives, steak knives
- Napkins – paper, two-ply or three-ply, fabrics,– washing facilities – imprints
The best thing to do is to summarise all relevant information on a list
Discover
PX-eBook.com, FnB Specialist Literatur
