How to Make Your Restaurant Look Expensive

Whether you’re redesigning your existing restaurant or you’re starting a brand-new restaurant from scratch, it’s important to make your space worthy of the price you’re charging for your food. While it may make sense to price your food based on the labor and ingredients that are used, most customers will gauge the value they’re getting by looking at the place they’re eating in.

Let’s be honest, people expect to pay more for simple dishes if they are presented in a more expensive looking atmosphere. Fortunately, there are ways to make your restaurant look more expensive. So what goes into the cost to build a restaurant?

Start By Deciding on a Theme

It won’t matter how nice the improvements you make will be if nothing seems to go together. The most important component of making a restaurant look expensive is to have a cohesive theme. For example, a restaurant that has expensive modern furnishings, but did not update their walls or flooring will look cheaper than a restaurant that didn’t do anything at all. Mismatched decor will make a restaurant look cheap.

Similarly, this is the main reason why it rarely works to do a renovation in stages. All too often, restaurant owners think they can save money by doing small parts of a renovation at a time. Maybe they swap out the furniture, then wait a few months before they can paint will only result in customers being confused.

Focus on the Entrance

The entrance to a restaurant will set the tone and mood for the rest of the evening. If the outside of the restaurant is dark and dingy, it won’t matter much at all what the interior looks like.

Start by updating and repairing the exterior of the restaurant, including the parking lot. Next, concentrate on the front door. Ideally, keep it clean of anything that takes away from the overall theming inside. Remove notices to employees and advertising to customers.

To truly make a restaurant feel expensive, you want the entrance to be a showpiece. It’s often cost-effective to hire a professional designer to develop an idea for the front of your shop that will impress customers. Don’t skimp on this area!

Choose Your Color Palette Carefully

Colors convey a lot about your restaurant. Restaurants with a classic theme should stick to earth tones, while modern restaurants will want to use white accented with bold colors. Picking the exact right colors can be complicated, however. You’ll want to consider how the colors you choose will look under a variety of lighting conditions. Dark colors may look sleek, for example, but they can also make a restaurant look dark and dirty.

When choosing a color scheme, you’ll also want to consider the colors that your competitors use. Specifically, you want to avoid copying the look of cheaper restaurants, even if the rest of your theming has no other similarities with those restaurants. For example, if you have a McDonalds anywhere in town, you’ll definitely want to avoid a white, yellow, and bright red color scheme. Similarly, you also want to avoid colors that are too similar to your direct competitors, particularly if those competitors just remodeled their restaurant.

If you’re having trouble choosing colors, don’t be afraid to hire a professional. Your restaurant colors will become part of your brand, it’s worth it to invest the money now to make the right decisions.

Consider Your Layout

Once you have the big pieces of your design figured out, it’s time to consider the interior layout. Because you have the other pieces pre-determined, you can now focus on figuring out the exact layout of the furniture. Consider some of these questions:

Should the restaurant have a bar? How large of a bar should be built? Realize that more bar room will detract from the number of tables you can put in. Expensive restaurants tend to have relatively few people who want to eat their meal at the bar, but you will need enough room for your bartenders to work. Most of your tables will want drink alcohol.

Are there ways to give privacy? Expensive restaurants tend to have customers that want to carry on conversations without being overheard by the tables next to them.

Will you include outdoor seating? This question can be a difficult one for upscale restaurants. While outdoor dining has become more popular over the last two years, few people will want to get dressed up to eat outside. You will also need to make arrangements to control for temperature, storms, and bugs.

Can the restaurant be rearranged for large groups? Expensive restaurants can do a good business in renting to companies for retreats, weddings, and other special events. The layout for this will likely be different than “normal” weekday seating, however.

All of these methods can help to improve a restaurant, but it’s absolutely crucial to ensure that your restaurant is meeting local codes and standards. A professional restaurant designer can help you not only ensure that there are no problems in the redesign, but they can also help you to improve your efficiency and save money on updates.