Guides · Restaurant · 13 min read · Updated September 2026

The restaurant and the café

The one workplace the tradition wrote most about after the shop, and the one the seating research has measured best; the teahouse and the eating house of the manuals, with the till, the stove, the god of wealth and the guest’s seat; which table a customer takes and why, ranked; the spacing and the stays the Cornell studies timed; the plan of a café read by both at once; and what an owner does with a room whose middle nobody wants to sit in.

Oriented S 180°

Fire

Fig. 01 Wooden tables along a wall, the seats with their backs to it. Customers choose the anchored table first and keep it longest, and the tradition seated its guests the same way for the same reason.

Of all the places people work, the eating house is the one the tradition wrote about most after the shop and the one the research has measured best, because a restaurant is a room in which strangers choose their own seats every hour and an owner can count what they choose. The workplaces guide gives the till and the office and the shop guide the shop the manuals were written for; this one gives the teahouse and the eating house of the manuals, with the till, the stove, the god of wealth and the guest’s seat in their places, and beside it the seating research, Robson’s review and the Cornell studies that timed how long a party stays at each kind of table and what it spends there. The two agree on nearly everything, which is the guide’s finding, and the plan of a café read by both at once is its centre.

The eating house, in the manuals

The manuals of the yang dwelling read a shop by its mouth and its till, and the eating house by three more things: the stove, the seat of the guest and the god. The stove is the kitchen god’s, which the household gods essay gives, and a restaurant’s kitchen kept his shelf above the range and his rule below it, the stove against a solid wall, its mouth away from the door and never seen from the room, which Knapp’s surveys of the teahouses and eating houses of the southern towns record in plan after plan, the kitchen across the back with a pass and the stove behind the pass out of sight. The guest’s seat is the command position laid for someone who is paying: the seat of honour in the hall faced the door with a wall behind it and the host sat opposite with his back to the room, which the dining room page gives for a house and the teahouse gave to every table, so that the booths along the walls of the old teahouse, screened at the sides and open to the room, are the tradition’s furniture and not the American diner’s. The god is the god of wealth, cai shen, whose shelf stood on a side wall of the shop facing into the room, with the till beneath or beside it, and never facing the door, since a god who looks at the door looks at the money leaving; Emmons found the shelf in most of the Hong Kong restaurants he surveyed and the owners consulting a geomancer about its wall and the till’s before anything else. Add the till’s rule, on the side wall toward the back with the door and the floor in view, and the door’s, nothing in its line and the room seen from the threshold, and the manuals’ eating house is complete: a mouth, a bright hall of tables, a till and a god at the side, a stove behind a wall at the back.

Which table, and why

Fig. 01 Which table a customer takes, ranked from the one chosen first to the one chosen last, as Robson’s review of the seating research and the Cornell studies with Kimes found it. The booth first, walls on three sides and the room in view, the table people ask for and keep longest; the wall table next, one seat with a wall behind it and the door in sight; the window table, liked by day for the street and avoided after dark when the glass becomes a black mirror with the room behind it; the screened floor table, an exposed table that a planter, a half wall or a change of level has turned into an anchored one, which is the whole of what a designer can do for the middle of a floor; the open floor table, nothing behind and traffic on every side, chosen last and left soonest; and the table at the door, by the pass or by the toilet, refused whenever there is a choice. Kimes and Robson measured the stays: parties at anchored tables sat longer and spent more per minute less, so that an owner who wants turnover puts the floor tables in and an owner who wants the evening trade puts the booths in, and both are reading the command position with a menu in it. Robson, Kimes, Becker and Evans measured the spacing: tables fifteen centimetres apart were rated crowded and left sooner than tables at thirty or sixty, and the difference was largest for couples. Robson 2002 for the review; Kimes and Robson 2004 and Robson, Kimes, Becker and Evans 2011 for the Cornell measurements, made in American casual restaurants. The tradition’s rule for the guest, a wall behind and the door in view, is the same ranking without the numbers.

The research starts where the tradition stops, with the customer who walks in and chooses. Robson’s review of the seating studies, from Sommer’s libraries and cafeterias to the restaurant work of the 1990s, finds one preference under all of them: people choose the anchored table, the one with a wall, a partition or a booth at their back and the room in front, and they choose it first, keep it longest and leave the open floor to the last comer, who leaves soonest. The sheet above ranks six positions from the finding. The booth first, walls on three sides and the room in view, the table asked for by name; the wall table next, one seat with a wall behind it and the door in sight, which is the command position with a menu; the window table, liked by day for the street and avoided after dark, when the glass becomes a black mirror with the room behind it and the seat that faced the street now faces a stranger’s reflection; the screened floor table, which is an exposed table that a planter, a half wall or a change of level has anchored, and is the whole of what a designer can do for the middle of a floor; the open floor table, nothing behind and traffic on every side, chosen last; and the table at the door, by the pass or by the toilet, refused when there is a choice and sold as the last seat in the house. Kimes and Robson then measured the stays, in a Cornell study of a casual restaurant with both kinds of table: parties at anchored tables sat longer, and their spending per minute was lower, since the bill does not grow with the time, so that the owner who wants turnover at lunch fills the floor with exposed tables and the owner who wants the evening trade builds booths, and both are reading the same preference from opposite ends. Robson, Kimes, Becker and Evans measured the spacing next: tables set fifteen centimetres apart were rated crowded and left sooner than tables at thirty or sixty, the difference largest for couples, which is Hall’s intimate distance breached by a stranger and the sofa guide’s bands applied to a room of strangers.

Evidence · What the numbers say to an owner

The studies are American and the restaurants casual, and the review says so; the preference for the anchored seat is the one result found in every culture Sommer and Robson looked at, and the numbers on stays and spacing are Cornell’s and should be read as an order of size. An owner reading them has three decisions. The booths and wall seats are the room’s capital and go to the evening; the floor tables are its turnover and go to lunch, with the planter that anchors them taken out at noon and put back at six. Tables at thirty centimetres apart lose less than tables at fifteen gain. And the seat that nobody chooses, at the door or by the pass, is better made a waiting bench or a shelf of papers than sold, since the customer put there remembers it.

A café, read by both at once

1The door and its line: nothing in it, the room seen from the threshold and no table in the draught
2The till on the side wall toward the back, the door and the whole floor in view, a wall behind
3The anchored tables, against the walls and in the booths, chosen first and kept longest
4The exposed tables in the middle and at the door, chosen last, the ones a screen or a planter anchors
5The kitchen at the back with the pass, the stove out of the room’s view, the extractor’s hum away from the tables
6The toilet door screened from the tables · the altar or the tank at the side, never facing the door

Plan 02 A café, read by the two traditions at once A café of twelve metres by eight, its door on the street at the bottom, read by the manuals of the shop and by the seating research together, since they agree on nearly everything. The door’s line is kept clear, so that the room is seen from the threshold and no table sits in the draught the door makes. The till stands on the side wall toward the back, the workplaces guide’s rule, with the door and the whole floor in view and a wall behind the person at it. The tables along the walls and in the booths are the anchored tables that Robson’s review finds customers choose first and keep longest; the tables in the middle of the floor and the one at the door are the exposed ones, chosen last, and a screen, a planter or a half-height partition beside them turns them into anchored ones. The kitchen is at the back with its pass, the stove out of the room’s view and its extractor’s hum away from the tables. The toilet door is screened from the nearest table, and the altar to the god of wealth, or the tank that stands in for it, is on a side wall, facing into the room and never the door.

The plan above is a café of twelve by eight metres read by the manuals and by the research together, and the six marks are the places where they meet. The door and its line first: nothing in the line, the room seen from the threshold, and no table in the draught the door makes, which the tradition read as the mouth of qi and the research reads as the table refused. The till on the side wall toward the back, the door and the whole floor in view and a wall behind, which is the workplaces guide’s rule and the position from which a proprietor also watches the room fill. The anchored tables along the walls and in the booths, the tradition’s guest seats and the research’s first choices. The exposed tables in the middle and the one at the door, the tradition’s floor of the bright hall and the research’s last choices, anchored where an owner wants them kept by the planter at waist height along the middle row. The kitchen at the back with its pass, the stove out of the room’s view and the extractor’s hum away from the tables, which the quiet guide would ask for and the air guide would ask for twice, since a café’s carbon dioxide at a full lunch is a bedroom’s at three in the morning. And the toilet door screened from the nearest table, with the altar, or the tank that stands in for it, on a side wall facing into the room. The lighting guide adds the one thing neither tradition wrote down and both practised, that the anchored tables are lit warm and low and the floor lit evenly, so that the booths are the rooms within the room. A café laid out on the plan has no table the tradition would call badly seated, and an owner who can name the six marks in their own room has read it.

The restaurant, in order

The door. Its line clear, the room seen from the threshold, a screen or a host stand a step inside; no table in the draught.
The till. On the side wall toward the back, the door and the floor in view, a wall behind; the god of wealth beside it, facing in.
The guest. Booths and wall seats first, the door in sight from them; these are the evening’s tables.
The floor. Exposed tables anchored with a planter, a half wall or a step, or kept for lunch and the party table.
The spacing. Thirty centimetres between tables at least; the fifteen-centimetre room loses the couple.
The kitchen. Across the back with a pass, the stove out of view, the extractor’s hum and the air both handled.
The last seat. By the door, the pass or the toilet: a bench, a shelf or a screen, not a table.