Open Source Restaurant Design

How many Mom & Pop restaurants do you see being created all the time in your neighborhood? We have one a week on average down here, in fact we're so jaded that it's a local game that everyone turns up on opening day for every new restaurant from sushi bars to taco joints. Usually that's the biggest day of most of these guys' careers, which often are mercifully short.

I was admiring one of our new additions yesterday, thinking that they had done a fine job of typesetting the text printed on their window, and that it even fit in well with the color and style of the interior decor. It occured to me that many restaurants have terrible design, as it's often the owners first attempt, and they know more about cooking (we hope) than interior design.

So my idea is a template library of well designed restaurant look & feels, with pointers to appropriate furniture suppliers and printers who'll give better prices because they're turning out the window stencils in more bulk.

This is sort of like a web-site template service crossed with a restaurant franchise, but without the franchiser and associated fees.

There could also be a set of fixed names for each style of restaurant... for example, a set of about 20 different names for Chinese restaurants, which I guess pretty much is the case already anyway :-) That way you can go to say a glassware vendor and get an engraved window for the "jade garden" that you could never possibly have been able to afford if you were the only Jade Garden in the country.

Same deal works for menus, giving the place something like the same consistency as a true franchise while still leaving it open to the chef to allow some originality.