Playbook, restaurant
Step free to the door is not the same as step free to a table
Access in a restaurant is decided at the level of individual furniture. A room can be entered at street level and still have no table a wheelchair fits under, because half the seating is a fixed banquette and the rest has a central pedestal. The guest asking is usually planning an occasion for somebody else and needs enough measured detail to make the judgement themselves, and the worst possible answer is a cheerful yes that turns into a difficult evening at a table by the kitchen door.
Why this is not the general answer
The handling pattern for accessibility requests holds across every trade. What follows is the part that does not.
- The relevant unit here is a table rather than a building, since fixed banquette seating, bench seats and pedestal bases each defeat a wheelchair in a different way, and a restaurant that is fully step free may still have only two tables that work.
- In a great many older sites the lavatories are down a flight of stairs to a cellar or up to a first floor, which means a guest can be seated comfortably and still be unable to stay for three courses, and that fact has to be volunteered rather than waited for.
- Noise is an access question in this trade and is treated as an atmosphere question everywhere else, because a hard floored room at half past eight on a Saturday is unusable for somebody lip reading and perfectly fine at six.
- Where the dining room is on a different floor from the entrance, the honest answer often includes that the accessible seating is in the bar or on the ground floor and carries a different menu, which is a fact the guest needs before booking rather than at the door.
How it arrives
- is the dining room upstairs
- is there a step at the front door
- do you have a table a wheelchair can get under
- where is the accessible toilet
- can you seat us somewhere quieter
- is a guide dog ok in the restaurant
What has to be indexed for this to work
| The route in, measured | Step heights at the entrance, whether there is a ramp and whether it is permanent or fetched, door widths, whether the door is held open during service, and what the surface outside is. Numbers rather than adjectives, because a guest can decide from a measurement and cannot decide from the word slight. |
|---|---|
| The seating described as furniture | Which tables are free standing and which are fixed banquettes, whether the bases are pedestals or legs, table heights where you know them, the widest gap between tables during a full service, and how many tables genuinely work for a wheelchair. This is the document nobody has and everybody needs. |
| Lavatories, honestly located | Which floor they are on, how many steps, whether there is an accessible cubicle and its door width, and whether reaching it means going through the kitchen passage. If the answer is a cellar staircase, that has to be published, because it decides whether the booking should be made at all. |
| The quiet parts of the room and the quiet hours | Where the softest seating is, which tables are away from the pass and the door, whether music plays and how loud it gets later, and which sittings are calmest. Useful for hearing loss, for autistic guests and for anybody bringing a small child. |
The reply
The front door is level from the pavement and the main dining room is all on that floor, so getting in and being seated is straightforward [1]. The part worth knowing before you book is that four of our tables are fixed banquettes and will not work for a wheelchair, so there are five free standing tables that do, and they are the ones to ask for when you book [2]. The lavatories are down a flight of stairs to the lower floor and there is no lift, which for some guests is the fact that decides it. The room is at its quietest before seven and gets loud after half eight.
It separates entry from seating, because a guest told the building is accessible will otherwise assume the table is too. The number of usable tables is given as a number, which lets the guest ask for the right thing at the point of booking. The lavatory answer is volunteered rather than waited for, since it is the one that most often changes the decision and finding it out on the night is the failure this page exists to prevent.
Where it stops
The trigger. The guest needs a specific table reserved, needs a ramp or a chair moved in advance, or is asking whether an arrangement is possible that nothing in the material covers.
I can describe the room but I cannot reserve a particular table or arrange anything for the night, and I would rather you had a definite answer than my best guess. Leave me your name, an email and what you need and the manager will come back to you and put a note on the booking.
It stops answering before it guesses, says who will pick it up, and asks for the one thing that makes a reply possible. Nothing about it reads as a dead end.
Never say this here
Out of bounds
- Never say the restaurant is accessible as a single word, because it describes the door and says nothing about whether there is a table a wheelchair fits under.
- Never guess a door width, a step height or a table height, since the guest is making a decision with a tape measure at home and a rounded figure sends them to a table that does not work.
- Never say the lavatories can be managed, when a flight of cellar stairs is a fact the guest is entitled to weigh for themselves.
- Never promise a specific table, a quieter corner or that an assistance dog will be fine in a particular area, as all three are floor decisions made by whoever is running the room.
Questions
- Can it reserve the accessible table?
- No. It cannot see or change the diary, so the strongest thing it can do is describe which tables work and tell the guest to name that when booking, then take the request and pass it to somebody who can put a note against it.
- Our building genuinely does not work. What should it say?
- Say that, in specific terms, with the reason. A guest who is told the dining room is up fourteen stairs with no lift can plan around it and will often still come to the bar. A guest given a vague answer books, arrives and has a bad evening in front of their family.
- How much of this needs measuring?
- Less than it sounds. An afternoon with a tape measure gives you the door, the step, the gap between tables and the height of the free standing tables, and those four numbers answer most of what arrives for the next several years.
Keep reading
- Everything for a restaurantHours, last orders, deposits and dietary options are safe ground. Confirming a dish is free of an allergen never is.
- Handling accessibility requests in generalTwo different things arrive as one message. A published accessibility statement answers the first. The second is a request, and it needs a person.
- The card machine took it, so the card machine has to explain itA deposit, a prepaid tasting menu seat, a card charge that looks doubled. Money that has left needs the person with the terminal records.
- The person asking has to get this past a finance departmentA card slip is not a VAT invoice. What a company diner needs on it, and why the service line has to be shown separately.
- Nobody is by the phone, and it is not only because you are closedThe phone goes unanswered mid service and again on the dark day. What is safe to answer at midnight, and what has to wait for a person.
Try it on your own material
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