A restaurant floor plan is a business tool before it is a drawing. Get the zoning right and covers flow, staff walk less and the fire officer signs off; get it wrong and every service is a bottleneck. This guide walks through designing a workable restaurant layout on an iPhone or iPad with RoomPlot - measured, zoned and ready to share.
Start with the zones
Before a single table goes down, block the space into its jobs: dining, bar, kitchen, WCs, storage and the entrance. A common rule of thumb is roughly 60% front of house for guests and 40% back of house for the kitchen and staff. Fixing the zones first stops you from cramming in tables and starving the kitchen of space.
Measure the shell
Accurate walls make everything downstream easy. Scan the unit with LiDAR on an iPhone or iPad Pro to detect the walls, doors and windows automatically, or draw them by hand from a template on any device. You end up with a fully editable plan you can zone, furnish and dimension.
Lay out the seating
Now fill the dining zone. RoomPlot's 376-item object catalogue gives you furniture to place, and you can duplicate a table-and-chairs group across the room in seconds. Keep the spacing honest:
- Allow around 15 sq ft (about 1.4 m2) per cover for a typical restaurant; more for fine dining, less for cafe or banquet seating.
- Leave at least 450 mm between the backs of occupied chairs so diners and staff can pass.
- Keep a clear main aisle for service and for accessible access to every table.
Because the plan is measured, RoomPlot's dimensions confirm those gaps rather than leaving them to guesswork, and the area calculation tells you the floor area of each zone so you can sanity-check the cover count.
Tip. Add a zone label to each area - Dining, Bar, Kitchen, WC - with its auto-calculated size. It makes the plan instantly readable for a landlord, a designer or a licensing officer, and the size sits right at the centre of each zone.
Plan the flow and the exits
A good layout moves people and plates without collisions. Trace the path from the pass to the furthest table and from the entrance to a seat - if either zig-zags through the bar, rework it. Then handle safety: RoomPlot's 28-item fire-safety library lets you mark emergency exits, escape-route arrows and extinguishers, and its coverage overlay draws the real area a smoke or heat detector protects, so you can show a clear, protected escape route on the drawing.
Share the plan
When the layout works, export it for whoever needs it:
- A4 PDF or PNG at 300 dpi for the operator, the landlord or the licence pack.
- Multi-page report PDF with your branding, an area summary and an automatic symbol legend.
- DXF when a shopfitter or designer wants the geometry in CAD.
The full set is at our guides.
Design the restaurant on the device, not on a napkin. Open RoomPlot, measure the unit, zone it, lay out the covers and export a plan that works for the business and for the fire officer alike.
