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Write down the floor area, where the door is, and how many covers you need. A scaled restaurant floor plan comes back in about a minute — dining room and kitchen split, tables at real sizes, aisles wide enough to carry a tray down, and the seat count printed on the drawing. Taking on a shell? Upload the plan and lay the restaurant out inside it.
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A restaurant floor plan is a scaled top-down drawing of a venue: the dining room with every table and seat, the bar, the kitchen and the rest of back of house, and the aisles between them. Describe yours and it comes back drawn to the seat count you gave.
Any drawing with the unit on it: the landlord's plan of the shell, a letting agent's plan, an existing restaurant layout you want re-planned, an architect's drawing, or a photo of the plan you measured on paper. Say "keep the exterior walls and columns exactly as drawn" and only the inside is laid out.
Examples
The input never changes: the same empty 1,600 sq ft shell, shopfront at the bottom, service door at the back. What changes is the sentence underneath — and with it the seat count. Click any prompt to load it into the box above and run it on your own plan.
What FloorDrafter returns, depending on what you ask
The floor area, where the door is and how many covers you need is enough to draw from. These three ran on nothing but the text underneath them.
Three steps, about a minute of waiting, no CAD and no furniture library to drag through.
Give the floor area or the dimensions, say which wall the customer entrance is on and where any service or delivery door is, and note the shopfront and window walls. Then say what kind of venue it is and how many seats you need — that number is what the whole plan gets sized against.
Name the spaces that have to fit behind the scenes: kitchen, dish room, dry store, walk-in, staff area, customer and staff toilets. Add any clearance you have to hold, such as a 42 in main aisle, and any fixed condition — the columns, the risers, the toilets you cannot move.
Pick a colour plan, a CAD drawing or a zoned presentation plan and hit generate. The layout comes back in about a minute with the seats counted. Change one thing at a time from there — swap four-tops for booths, move the bar, add table numbers — and each version keeps the walls you started with.
A restaurant layout gets picked apart by four different people, and each of them checks one number. These are the figures the plan is drawn to — write a different one in your brief and it is drawn to yours instead.
60% of the floor is dining
Start from roughly 60% front of house and 40% back of house. A 1,600 sq ft unit gives about 960 sq ft of dining room — that number, not the total, is what your covers come out of.
40% of the floor, on the service side
Kitchen, dish room, dry store, walk-in and staff have to fit in the other 40%, sit against the service door, and run in flow order — delivery, store, cold prep, hot line, pass, dish return — so dirty crockery never crosses clean food.
18 in between chair backs
At least 18 in / 460 mm between the backs of occupied chairs, 42–60 in / 1.07–1.52 m between the edges of tables set in parallel, and a 42 in / 1.07 m main aisle. Squeeze these and you gain covers you will spend the next five years apologising for.
5% of tables, 36 in route
Under the 2010 ADA Standards at least 5% of dining surfaces — never fewer than one — must be accessible and spread through the room, reached by a route at least 36 in / 915 mm wide, with 27 in / 685 mm of knee clearance under a top 28–34 in / 710–865 mm high.
These are the planning figures restaurant designers work to, and they are what the drawing is laid out against. They are not a code submission: occupancy, exit widths, extraction and health-department requirements are set by your local authority and have to be checked by whoever signs off the fit-out.
Seat count is arithmetic, not opinion: take the floor area, keep about 60% of it for dining, and divide by the square feet each seat needs. That last figure is set by the kind of venue you are opening — a counter-service café needs more room per seat than a casual restaurant, because the queue and the pickup point take floor too. Each card below runs the same sum on the same 1,500 sq ft unit, which leaves 900 sq ft of dining room.
18–20 sq ft/seat → 45–50 seats
Wide spacing, larger tables, room for service from both sides and often a sommelier's path. The most floor per guest of any table-service format, and the reason a 1,500 sq ft fine dining room seats fewer people than a 900 sq ft café.
12–15 sq ft/seat → 60–75 seats
The densest table-service format: two-tops and four-tops that push together, banquettes down one wall to save the width two chairs would take. This is the default the plan uses when you just say "restaurant".
18–20 sq ft/seat → 45–50 seats
Counts high for the same reason fine dining does, but for the opposite cause: the order queue, the pickup point and the milk-and-sugar station all take dining floor, and nobody wants to sit in the line.
11–14 sq ft/seat → 64–82 seats
Small fixed tables, short dwell time, often bolted-down seating and no server circulation to plan around. The tightest seat spacing that still works — but budget more of the unit for back of house than a café does.
15–18 sq ft/seat → 50–60 seats
Bar stools are counted differently: allow 24–30 in / 610–760 mm of counter per stool and 42 in / 1.07 m of clear space behind them, then plan the table seating on top of that.
10–11 sq ft/seat → 82–90 seats
The densest layout there is, because the tables are set once for a known number and nobody is ordering at them. Plan it round rather than square if you want the number at the top of the range.
Restaurant furniture comes in a small set of standard sizes, and a seating plan is really an exercise in fitting those sizes between your walls with the aisles still open. These are the ones the plan is drawn to unless you say otherwise.
| Element | Standard size | What to write in the brief |
|---|---|---|
| Two-top table | 24 x 30 in / 610 x 760 mm | "Two-tops along the window wall" |
| Four-top table | 36 x 36 in / 900 x 900 mm square, or 30 x 48 in / 760 x 1220 mm | "Four-tops down the middle of the room" |
| Round four-top | 42–48 in / 1.07–1.22 m across | "Six 48 in round tables in the centre" |
| Four-person booth | 72–84 in / 1.83–2.13 m overall length | "A booth run along the window wall" |
| Bar counter per stool | 24–30 in / 610–760 mm of counter each | "A 24 ft bar counter with 12 stools" |
| Between occupied chair backs | 18 in / 460 mm minimum | "Keep 18 in between occupied chair backs" |
| Between parallel table edges | 42–60 in / 1.07–1.52 m | "42 in between table rows" |
| Main aisle / behind bar stools | 42 in / 1.07 m | "A 42 in main aisle from the entrance to the back" |
| Accessible route and table | 36 in / 915 mm route; 27 in / 685 mm knee clearance | "One accessible table in each seating area" |
Write your figures in whichever units you measured in — feet and inches or metres — and the plan is labelled in the same ones. Mixing both in one brief is the fastest way to get a drawing that is scaled to neither.
Almost every disappointing restaurant plan traces back to something the brief left out. These six, in this order, are what the drawing actually needs.
"1,600 sq ft, 40 ft x 40 ft" or "150 m², 12 m x 12.5 m". Say if it is long and narrow rather than square — a 10 ft wide unit is a completely different plan from a 40 ft one of the same area.
And which walls have the shopfront or windows. The entrance sets the host stand, the queue and the main aisle; the glazed wall is the seating everyone wants and the one you should not fill with a kitchen.
One number: "seat 72". It is what the rent, the staffing and the kitchen size are all argued from, and it is the one thing the plan is checked against at the end.
Fine dining, casual, café, takeaway, bar. It sets the square feet per seat, the table mix and how much of the floor goes to back of house — say it and the rest follows.
Kitchen, dish room, dry store, walk-in cooler, staff area, staff toilet, customer toilets, and the service or delivery door. Leave one out and it will not appear — there is no code check quietly adding it for you.
Columns, risers, existing toilets, the extraction route, the fire exit. Name them and they stay; leave them out and you will get a plan that is beautiful and unbuildable.
Every plan comes back as a high-resolution PNG; downloads made before you settle on a plan carry a small watermark. Nothing is locked to one drawing style — the same layout can be re-rendered as a colour plan, a CAD drawing or a zoned presentation plan.
Send it to the landlord, the fit-out contractor or your business partner. High enough resolution to print at A3, and you can print or save it as a PDF straight from the browser.
Export the walls, doors and windows as lines in metres and open it in AutoCAD, Revit or any DXF-capable tool. It gives your designer a correct outline to start from instead of retyping your measurements.
Judge the seating on the colour plan, hand the CAD version to the contractor, and use the zoned presentation plan to show front of house against back of house in one picture. The layout does not change between them.
Three ways to get a restaurant floor plan, and what each one asks of you.
| FloorDrafter | Drag-and-drop planner | Restaurant designer | |
|---|---|---|---|
| You supply | A paragraph: area, entrance, covers, back of house | Every table, dragged in one at a time | A site visit, a concept and a budget |
| Time to a first layout | About a minute | An afternoon | Two to six weeks |
| Who counts the covers | The plan does, and prints the number | You do, by counting chairs on screen | They do, in the schedule |
| Back of house | Zoned in flow order, sized from the brief | Whatever you drag in | Designed properly, with equipment |
| Good for | Testing whether a unit works before you sign | Tweaking a layout you have already settled | The drawings you actually build from |
The rent is per square foot but the revenue is per cover. Draw the seating before the lease, not after, and find out whether the unit carries the covers your numbers assumed.
Upload the landlord's plan, keep the walls and columns exactly as drawn, and see three ways the restaurant could sit inside them before you pay anyone to draw one.
Same walls, same kitchen, different seating: swap four-tops for booths along the window and see what it does to the cover count, at aisles you can still carry a tray down.
Put three options in front of a client in the time it used to take to draw one, then take the one they like into proper software.
Straight answers about seat counts, spacing, back of house and what this is not.
Give the floor area, the entrance and the covers you need — or upload the plan of the unit — and see the layout, with the seats counted, in about a minute.
