Perception

What makes up our perception of a restaurant? Is it their service, their price or the type of food? It’s all three but it’s also the environment of the restaurant – including decorations, floor and wall coverings and furniture. It is the environment that a customer experiences first and what sets up their expectations for the meal.

Take, for example, going out for a steak. A candle-lit, finely decorated restaurant could reasonably be expected to have higher prices and high quality food. A restaurant with overhead fluorescent lighting and posters on the wall could be expected to have fast service and lower costs. It doesn’t even matter if the steaks are identical – the customer will think of the steakhouse steak as tastier. Clearly, perception is at least important as actual experience.

That is why restaurants put so much effort into creating the environment of a restaurant, from figuring out the layout to buying the furniture and decorations. Every little bit of design is focused on creating and maintaining the correct perception for the consumer. This perception stands on the foundation that the designer creates, from big items like bars to little ones such as the pedestal table base. When it comes to restaurant furniture, table bases tend to be something people overlook.

However the table – and by extension the table base – is arguably the most important part of the entire environment. It is, after all, the physical point where the consumer interacts with the product of the restaurant (the food and the service). When that point of experience is unstable, it begins to bring down the perception that the restaurant is striving for. A wobbly table lessens the experience customers have by drawing attention from the food or their companions to the furniture.

At JI Bases we speak of the table base as being the foundation – a foundation for a table, but also for the experience. A stable table helps maintain the perception that the restaurant wants to convey. And though it is a small part of the greater array of restaurant furniture it should not be overlooked. That is why we’ve spent the last 50 years perfecting the pedestal table base.