The Future of Restaurants

“Eating out is not just food,” says Chris Davis, a senior architect at Hastings Architecture. “It is the service and the atmosphere, the whole experience.”

What will that experience be like post-pandemic? And not just in relation to the immediate changes centering on reducing spread of COVID-19, such as fewer tables, the use of PPE and disposable menus. But rather, what comes next? When there’s a vaccine, will we still have counter seating and open kitchens? We asked local architects and designers, including Davis, to take us into the future.

“When you think about it, restaurants have not changed that much ever,” says Sarah Milkie, an interior designer and owner of Milkie Design Studio. “This could really shake up the design.”

Designated Takeout Areas

Like many of us, Davis has enjoyed takeout from his favorite restaurants to get through quarantine, and he sees takeout continuing as an intentional part of restaurant operations. Davis savors the experience of taking something “from the kitchen of a skilled chef to my dining room,” and thinks that will be a focus of design going forward. Imagine an area that is not an afterthought, but rather a separated space where you can pick up your food — a space that has the same vibe as the dining room. Davis, who has worked on local restaurant projects including Watermark and Kayne Prime, thinks the days of having foam containers stacked on the host stand are over. Takeout customers will enter through a separate door, and receive packaging that is branded and in line with the design aesthetic of the restaurant.

John Foster is the co-founder of Katalyst Restaurant Concepts, which designs kitchens for fast-casual restaurants. He says that even before the pandemic, interest in to-go food was increasing, and now at least 50 percent of the projects Katalyst is working on are looking at takeout. “If they didn’t have an effective way to do takeout, we are designing that now,” he says.

The answer might be getting you to stay in your car. No, restaurants aren’t going to continue to have someone run out and put your food in your trunk while you are double-parked. But Foster says restaurants that have never had a drive-thru are now asking him to design one.

That doesn’t mean your favorite sit-down restaurant will look like a fast-food joint. Milkie, who in the past has worked on projects at E3 Chophouse and Johnny Cash’s Kitchen & Saloon, imagines an all-glass experience, where the drive-thru is like an open kitchen, where you can see chefs at work.

Welcome to the Waiting Room

Milling about at the host stand, elbow to ass with other diners while waiting for a table, might be something you’ll never do again. Davis predicts restaurants could start using apps that allow them to see when clients with reservations are arriving, enabling staff to greet them with drinks and usher them into waiting areas until their table is ready. Not only does that change the density at the door, it also allows restaurants to guide guests through an experience for the evening. “It feels like it is about high-end, but is about their safety,” he says.

Cleanliness Is Next

If Foster had his way, restaurants would operate as if they were hospital kitchens. “It is more than gloves and masks,” he says. “It is being able to sanitize the entire kitchen from floor to ceiling.”

In a bar, for example, he likes to design so that drains, water lines and soda lines are concealed, so no one has to get on their knees under the jockey box to clean a spill off those tubes. Elements like a closed area around such lines are often cut when cost savings are necessary, but Foster thinks a post-pandemic mindset might keep them in the budget. “We should brag about being known as super-clean kitchens.”

Dining Rooms Become Sacred Spaces

Forget the days of having someone walk through the dining room, next to your table where you are having a tête-à-tête, to get their takeout order. Such traffic interrupts the dining experience, and Davis thinks future dining rooms may be smaller — as takeout remains a strong business — but more intentional and self-contained. Without people waiting for their tables or their takeout, without all that milling about, the dining room experience becomes exclusively about dining in.

Milkie thinks high-backed booths may be one new dining room detail. These semi-private areas could have screens around them to allow diners to experience the buzz of being in a packed dining room, and have some transparency to the world around them, but also make them feel separate from the tables next to them. The omnipresent communal table? That’s likely a thing of the past.

Kitchen Considerations

With more emphasis on takeout and delivery and the permanent addition of small grocery sections, the kitchen-to-dining-room ratio will change. Kitchens might not get larger — square footage will still be an issue, and real estate will still cost money. In fact, Foster says he’s seeing average kitchen sizes shrink from 5,000 square feet to more like 2,800 square feet. But they will be rearranged, and may take up space that used to be allocated to tables.

“One of the biggest footprint items is a walk-in freezer,” says Nick Dryden, principal at Dryden Architecture and Design, which is working on Sean Brock’s Nashville Yards restaurant and designed Noelle and many other projects around town. Many farm-to-table-style restaurants have eschewed the freezer in the past, and Dryden predicts even more will eliminate the freezer from their plans as they work more closely with their food sources to reduce waste and to document provenance.

And about those open kitchens? People may not want to sit at a counter a foot away from food being prepared, but they will want to know what is going on, says Manuel Zeitlin, founder of Manuel Zeitlin Architects. His firm has worked on a number of restaurant projects, including Pastaria and Henrietta Red. “You may not have as many open kitchens, but [kitchen staff] will be more visible with more glass,” says Zeitlin. “People want to see the process.” One creative example is the see-through cheese cave in Yolan, the restaurant in the soon-to-open Joseph hotel. It provides some transparency to the kitchen without being open.

Or maybe it goes one step further. In pre-pandemic times, folks were beginning to consider “ghost kitchens” — stand-alone buildings not connected to dining rooms in parts of town where real estate is affordable, with the kitchens preparing food for takeout and delivery only. Both Milkie and Davis see growing interest in these smaller buildings.

Get Some Fresh Air

Right now, people seem to feel most comfortable outdoors. Davis imagines the future filled with European-style pedestrian-only areas in neighborhoods like the Gulch where patios could expand.

Of course, the weather doesn’t always cooperate. Davis says that on any patio project he’s worked on, even if there wasn’t a request to design a canopy, his team did so because they knew it would come eventually. Nashville has four seasons, and making a patio space that can generate revenue year-round is essential.

Dryden says conversations are already happening in regard to examining health department and building codes as they relate to outdoor spaces — in short, with al fresco dining, you don’t want to bring outdoor pests and flies indoors. He thinks there may be some new approaches for patio seating as a result of rethinking outdoor spaces.

But you don’t have to be outside to get fresh air. David Plummer, a principal with Centric Architecture, says looking at COVID-19 and how it is transmitted has underscored something architects and public health experts already knew: Better ventilation systems and more fresh air indoors are better for healthy customers and workers.

Davis and Dryden agree that sustainable and environmentally friendly air handling, while something customers can’t see, will likely be one of the essential discussions in future restaurant design. “People don’t want to be in a hermetically sealed box,” says Dryden.

Flexibility Is Key

No one knows what’s happening tomorrow, much less two years from now, so designing spaces that can be adapted to what’s next will be essential. “Everyone is learning how to be agile, and spaces are being designed so that they can be reconfigured easily,” Zeitlin says.

Julia Jaksic, who owns Cafe Roze in East Nashville and is in the process of opening Roze Pony in Belle Meade, creates restaurants with small, cozy spaces, and she doesn’t anticipate that changing.

She’s run restaurants after pandemics before, including at Employees Only Singapore post-SARS. While that pandemic ushered in changes, they were temporary. “Instead of manipulating design, you manipulate business models,” she says. One example is Cafe Roze’s addition of a Bodega, which allowed locals to buy essentials without going to a traditional grocery store during the height of COVID concerns.

“You don’t want to lose the essence of what a restaurant is,” Jaksic adds. “I think hospitality is making memories. You have to make sure that when you are going in and changing design that you are not ruining what we are trying to do.”