Choosing Dining Chairs For Restaurant

Choosing dining chairs for restaurants is essential. Customers want to feel well served in a restaurant and to be served delicious food and drinks, but they also want to feel comfortable, including armchairs, which furnish the lounge and bar area.

Armchairs For Catering: Decision Criteria for The Purchase

If you want to set up a restaurant or a bar with a lounge, you must find the right furniture. Would you prefer simple chairs with a modern flair? Or would you prefer large wingback chairs with velvet covers? The new Dining chairs must necessarily match the rest of the interior and should also harmonize with the establishment itself.

This is mainly focused on the design of the furniture, but some practical aspects also need to be considered. Lastly, prices also play a role because armchair models for the catering industry are expensive. Not every start-up can afford this. The following selection criteria can be used as a decision-making aid in finding and selecting the right armchairs.

Legal Regulations: Observe Fire Protection

In principle, what the guests are sitting on in the restaurant is irrelevant. You can sit on chairs or armchairs, on the sofa, or the floor. In this regard, no legal regulations would make it difficult for the restaurateur to choose. Instead of paying attention to legal requirements, he can concentrate on design and prices. Nevertheless, one point needs to be mentioned, and that concerns fire protection.

This is aimed at the object itself, as well as at the development and furnishings, which should be flame-retardant at best. When choosing armchairs for catering, care should be taken to ensure that the current possible points regarding fire protection are observed or achieved. Flame-retardant fabrics are, therefore, preferable to materials that do not bear this marking.

Fire behavior should nevertheless be taken into account—and that’s for safety and insurance reasons alone! Furniture with a fire rating classification has passed a so-called cigarette, match, and paper cushion test and does not prove to be a fire accelerator in practice, as is unfortunately often the case. Tip: The prices for furniture tested in this way are no higher than for many other armchairs and chairs where the focus was solely on the design!

Buy Cheap Armchairs for The Restaurant?

Those who want to open a bar, lounge, or restaurant should look very carefully at the prices. What could be more obvious than looking for suitable furniture in the hardware store, for example? After all, there are always special offers for chairs and armchairs there, some of which have really unusual designs. However, this is not recommended because the furniture available there has been manufactured for private use.

This means that they are not designed to carry many people every day, some of whom have a very high body weight. Welds, trunnions, material thicknesses, and other details do not last long, and so the well-known saying “Who buys cheap, buys twice” proves to be true once again.

Pay Attention to The Material

When looking for furniture for the catering industry, the focus is often on the design, not the material. The choice is between metal and covered with artificial leather, some are set on wood. However, with an armchair that is supposed to be used in the catering industry, the focus is much more on the material. After all, the good piece should look good right after the purchase and after many people have already sat on it, and it should not show any material weaknesses.

To make the selection a little easier, here is a small material customer:

• Velvet and fabric

  Synthetic fibers are generally used for fabric upholstery. On the one hand, they are cheaper than pure natural fibers, which is noticeable in the prices of armchairs. In addition, synthetic fibers are easier to clean, abrasion—and tear-resistant, and more difficult to ignite. Thus, armchairs and chairs made of synthetic fibers have a long service life. A sponge moistened with mild, soapy water is usually enough to clean the upholstery.

  By the way, velvet is much less resilient, and this material rubs off faster and quickly shows brighter spots. Although this can contribute to the desired shabby chic, if you don’t want to live it in your gastronomy, you should rather rely on normal fabric. Velvet is also significantly more light-sensitive. Appropriate furniture is particularly suitable for areas that are frequented a little less often, or that should radiate a special solidity.

• Leatherette

  Modern leatherette covers look almost like genuine leather, but only the connoisseur can see the differences. Artificial leather is made of synthetic fibers coated with PVC on the surface. Artificial leather is particularly well suited for armchairs, because on the one hand, the corresponding pieces of furniture look noble, on the other hand, they are easy to clean. They can be wiped off, and stains rarely remain. Especially in a bar with a lounge, where drinks are spilled more often, leatherette is a good option. To dry after cleaning, simply wipe with a wet cloth; that’s it!

• Wood

  Pure wooden furniture is rather uncomfortable, but it can be combined with thick pillows. However, wooden surfaces are sensitive to moisture and quickly show stains from spilled liquids. Seating furniture made of rattan is often chosen; so-called wicker chairs have long been back in fashion. Here, too, it is true that the selected parts must necessarily match the style of the rest of the furniture, otherwise wooden furniture in particular looks a little strange in the respective environment.

Pay Attention to Disinfectant Resistance

Even though the topic of disinfection has been on everyone’s lips, especially since Corona, there have been calls from the catering industry even before the pandemic that pieces of furniture should definitely be disinfectable. With the use of special materials, the experts have fulfilled this wish and made the chairs, armchair models, and couches disinfectable.

This ensures hygiene and that the furniture does not suffer damage when using the appropriate agent. If you want to buy a new armchair today, you should pay attention to this point! Modern furniture made of artificial leather is usually also wipeable with disinfectants, so there should be no problems in this regard.

Focus On Quality

Even if it is a matter of finding furniture that is as cheap as possible for the catering industry, the quality of the furnishings must still be correct. Unfortunately, this is where the problem of Internet shopping often manifests itself: at first glance, the products look good and seem resilient and high-quality. But at a second glance, it turns out that they are not exactly that. Therefore, restaurateurs are better off buying on the spot or from Internet providers who have distinguished themselves in the past with their high-quality pieces of furniture and have become known for them.

Do You Rely on Unique Lounge Furniture?

The term “lounge” has been used in gastronomy for many years. It refers to a quiet corner where guests can retreat and are equipped with exceptionally comfortable furniture. Of course, the guests are also entertained here, but they have a little privacy and often feel at home. If you want to offer a lounge as a restaurateur, you should equip it with high-quality equipment accordingly.

The lounge is already ready with a comfortable, thickly upholstered sofa, a table, a dimmable light, and space for several people. However, there is no need to rely on unique lounge furniture because there are no specifications for what a lounge should look like. It can be designed entirely freely and should adapt to the rest of the interior. A simultaneous take-off and harmonization is required.