An open-kitchen restaurant, without losing the open kitchen
Hospitality · design target set by guest comfort, not a regulation
Illustrative worked example. This is a realistic brief run through Echo using the same method a real report uses — not an account of a named past client. See every case study for more, including which of these are real, permissioned projects as they're added.
The brief
An independent small-plates restaurant had a review pattern the owner could set a clock by: five stars for the food, and a noise complaint in nearly every review mentioning a table conversation. The open kitchen pass — the centrepiece of the room — was the one thing not up for discussion.
Dining room with open kitchen pass
16 × 8 × 3.8 m, about 486 m³ — polished concrete floor, painted brick walls, exposed steel-truss ceiling, full-height glazing to the street.
Concrete, brick, steel and floor-to-ceiling glass left almost nothing to absorb the room's own noise, putting it at roughly 1.05 seconds — lively at half capacity, and the reason a full room made conversation genuinely difficult by the second course.
The standard, and the target
There's no statutory target for a restaurant, so the brief was guest comfort: not a library, but a room where two people across a table can hear each other without leaning in — in practice, something in the 0.7 to 0.9 second range, closer to a well-run dining room than the untreated 1.0-plus it started at.
The constraint
The open kitchen pass was the restaurant's signature feature and explicitly off-limits to anything that would block sightlines to the chefs, and the street-facing glazing drove passing footfall too heavily to curtain over. That eliminated the two largest, most obvious surfaces before the brief reached a shortlist.
The decision
Ceiling-suspended acoustic baffles were positioned in the sections of ceiling that don't sit over the pass, upholstered banquette seating replaced the loose chairs along the one uninterrupted brick wall, and felt-faced panels went on the single wall with neither glazing nor kitchen frontage.
Every route considered, vendor-neutral — we don't sell any of it.
- Suspended ceiling baffles, clear of the passabout 40 m²
Positioned section by section to leave every sightline to the kitchen open.
- Upholstered banquette seating22 covers
Replaced loose bar-style chairs along the one clear brick wall.
- Felt-faced wall panelsabout 14 m²
The only wall in the room without glazing or kitchen frontage to work around.
The outcome
The three changes brought the room from roughly 1.05 seconds to around 0.75 — inside the guest-comfort range the brief called for, with the open kitchen exactly as visible as it was before.
Indicative figures for this example, from the same method a real report uses. Not a measured survey and not a compliance certificate — where one is required, that's a survey to BS EN ISO 3382-2.
Now do it for your room.
Four questions, sixty seconds. Free to see whether you have a problem.
Check my room →Questions people ask
Won't baffles over half the ceiling do half the job?
Not proportionally — the sections chosen still cover the areas doing the most reflecting back onto the tables, which is why the fitted figure lands close to the guest-comfort range despite the pass area being untouched.
Does this mean the room got quieter, or dead?
Quieter, not dead — 0.75 seconds is still on the lively side, deliberately. The brief was never silence; it was getting back into a range where a table of four can hear itself.
Is 0.7–0.9 seconds an official hospitality standard?
No — there's no regulation to point to for a restaurant, which is worth being honest about. It's a design judgement based on what comfortable dining rooms typically measure at, not a cited figure.