How to Avoid 10 Common Restaurant Architectural Mistakes

Restaurateurs have to wear many hats, including gracious host, food specialist, corporate strategist, financial analyst, human resources director, marketing chief, and project manager.

Nowhere on that list is "architect," but lots of start-up restaurants find that hiring a professional designer is too costly for the initial capital budget, so the restaurateur ends up laying out the restaurant themselves, often with bumpy results.

Or maybe an architect is brought on board to design a new restaurant space but doesn't have a lot of F&B experience and relies instead on what the architect recalls from personal dining out experiences to plan the space. In either case, the result is often a less than optimal buildout.

Here are the 10 most common architectural design mistakes I see in new restaurants. Each of these problems can be prevented if your architect has a good understanding of what you need the restaurant to be able to do and if you have selected the right space to lease to begin with. And few of these errors are the result of overly elaborate architectural goals -- often the simplest issues are the ones that present the most challenges if they are not handled correctly.