Part 2: Making a Good Entrance
A well-designed entrance at first draws in the customer, and once they are inside, immediately makes them feel comfortable with their choice of restaurant. And yet, most people who have bought a vintage diner in the past twenty years have dismissed the entrance's importance and potential, preferring — for whatever reason — to guide their customers to a side door. With few exceptions, these alternatives rarely rise to the same level of aesthetic standards set by those who designed the original vestibule.
The owners meant well, but the premier attraction of this restaurant cowers under the addition.
Case in point: The Tilt’n Diner in Tilton, New Hampshire. In the early 1990s, the Common Man chain of restaurants in New Hampshire purchased, nominally restored, and set up a 1950s O’Mahony diner and attached it to a stick-built addition housing a larger dining area and the kitchen. Without access to the Common Man’s balance sheet, we assume its decade-plus of operation has done sufficiently well for its owners. From an aesthetic standpoint, however, this restaurant's entrance fails on all three levels.
From the road, approaching customers see a big box looming behind a shiny diner attached at the front. Traffic is then routed around and towards the side of the restaurant, where the bulk of the parking lot spreads out. Spaces in front of the diner’s vestibule do exist, but the lot layout makes it pretty clear that the restaurant wants you to walk in the side entrance. It turns out that the hostess station is behind that door, in any case. The vestibule remains marginally functional, with a crushed-stone walkway that further indicates its secondary status (and renders it impassable for anyone in heels).
Once inside, the customer chooses to sit either in the new area, a spacious, plain-vanilla showcase for the restaurant’s “fifties” ephemera and memorabilia, or to detour to the right into the original O’Mahony diner through a portal in its back wall. The customer's first impression, already muddled by entry into the “back room,” further dims by emerging from a doorway originally designed for access to the men’s room.
Though the Tilt’n calls the diner its “front room,” it hardly functions as one. For most of its customers, all that built-in atmosphere goes to waste. The mood isn’t set by the meticulous craftsmanship and style created by the original builders, but by the broad splashes of antique store merchandise tacked to drywall and hanging from drop ceilings. The diner turns out to be an afterthought and almost purely ornamental. Indeed, it probably has little to do with the actual success of the restaurant. Given the burdens of transport, restoration, and retrofitting involved in such projects, it likely imposed a net burden on revenues. Remove it — or replace it with a stick-built replica — and I suspect that the restaurant known as the Tilt’n Diner would hum along with little impact.
Codes and regulations have much to do with design decisions like this, but so do the ultimate intentions of the operators. While it may keep the carpet cleaner to direct guests through the kitchen or a side door, common rules of hospitality preclude that practice. An entrance to any restaurant reveals much to the customer — especially the first-timer. Independent diner owners would do well to carefully observe how this works with chain restaurants. Doorways that draw customers into such places as Applebee’s, Bennigan’s, or even the front porch of a Cracker Barrel set the tone for the rest of the experience.
So I think the decisions made at the Tilt'n squandered some opportunities. For the entrance is the first impression of a restaurant, and few dispute the value of first impressions. Ideally, the building should provide obvious visual clues on how to enter and what to expect once inside. A diner’s vestibule solves this problem while providing a place for customers to wait for open seats. In some of the more spacious examples, it also accommodates the sale of merchandise, from souvenir T-shirts to baked goods. In short, a properly designed entrance helps to sell the whole business.
Next: Counter points
