The design of your restaurant isn’t going to change the flavour of the meal — except, of course, it does. It does because people can’t judge the meal until they’ve eaten it, but they can judge the packaging. And if they choose someone else’s restaurant, yours never gets a chance.
Not only that, but confirmation bias* creates a self-fulfilling prediction; the customer would rather be proven right than proven wrong. The person who bought all their friends to your restaurant isn’t likely to admit they made a bad recommendation by complaining.
I think this is so important that it’s worth repeating another way. Most times, most customers decide whether they are going to enjoy your food before they eat it. Crazy but true.
Think about it, when was the last time you heard anyone admit they were wrong? Sure, you can cook a bad meal and some might complain, but the game’s yours to lose by that stage because they’re not looking to find fault.
This is why it’s vital to understand the worldview and biases of the customers you seek to delight, and why all the signs we display matter so much more than we imagine, including everything you design.
It is why when planning a new food venture you shouldn’t leap at the design you like personally or the one you want to give to the world, and why you should first ask the world what it wants from you. It is why you should hire the best, most experienced, least biased and most professional design team you can find and give them as much time and creative freedom as they ask for to find out what the world wants before you start building your brand, your website, your outlets, and your menu.
Design matters less than your food once your outlet is established and has enough regular, loyal customers. But if your sales begin to fall don’t wait until they crash — act while you can still afford to. It’s easy to get sucked into a whirlpool within which sales keep plunging.
The best time to refurbish is just before you need to. Regular customers can be told what’s coming; they will enjoy this.
Design also matters less when the type of the food you sell is at the extreme high-end and your rarefied dishes are the whole story of your business. The top celebrity chefs do not need to worry about design so much as they do their food (but mostly they still do), but I’m talking very top end celebrity chef type outlets here though. There aren’t many, so you probably don’t own one, and anyhow, these kind of restaurants seem to appeal the most to other chefs.
It’s not always fair that we need to worry about how we and our work will be judged but until we think of a better way to communicate the work we’ve done, prepare to be judged in advance by your design.
*Confirmation bias is a term psychologists use to describe our tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of our existing beliefs or theories whilst ignoring all evidence we disagree with
Nigel Witham designed his first restaurant in 1990 and it is still thriving. Since then, he’s travelled the world, talking to thousands of restaurant and café owners. His work has helped turn some of his clients into multi-millionaires. Witham has a team of designers working on five continents and works for a few carefully selected clients. You can contact Nigel Witham on Facebook and LinkedIn.
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