A Quantitative Guide to Seating in Food Halls

The first thing to consider when planning seating for a food hall is how long you want the customer to spend at the hall itself. Do you want the hang time to be over 45 minutes? Do you want people to go there for dates, business meetings, or family outings? If so, then this article is for you.

If you want a variety of uses to find the space valuable, you need seating environments that compliment those uses, but this has to be done with the calculus of retail real estate in mind. We like to start with the food vendors, because they are the foundation of the offering.

A food hall vendor will need to sell between 100-200 meals a day to land firmly on the center of the revenue bell curve for retailers within food halls. Of course, there will be outliers, but this is a good planning framework. If our food hall has 10 vendors, then we’re looking at 1,500 visitors per day in food sales. Spreading this over an 11-hour lunch and dinner day part, we arrive at ~136 diners per hour, if an even number of people dined in each hour, but that’s obviously not the case.

People dine in mini bell curves over meal periods within peak utilization hours. These hours will see roughly 2.25 times the straight-line average if well operated. That means that we should roughly plan for ~300 seats in this hypothetical food hall.

Looked at from a traditional restaurant perspective of “turns” or the number of times a seat or table is utilized throughout the day, we see that 1,500 diners and 300 seats will imply that each seat is “turned” 5 times. This is an aggressive, but realistic figure utilized traditionally by optimized full service restaurants. If we believed that we could only turn the seats 3 times, we are probably space inefficient which produce underperforming real estate metrics. At 7 assumed turns (on average) we’re probably operationally inefficient, which means customer disappointment in a multitude of forms.

Similarly, a food hall vendor should quantitatively assess whether there are enough attractive seating options to get 100, 200, or 300 meals a day. Or, whether or not the designer has added too many food hall vendors for the available traffic and seating. This is typically related to the differing business models and should be carefully considered.

Back to our hypothetical example of 1,500 daily diners divided by 5 turns, we arrive at 300 seats, which checks with our 2.25x metric over a straight-line average of diners per hour. When further divided by the hypothetical 10 vendors, we arrive at the sum of 30 seats per planned food vendor.

And this conversely check out, if the food vendor wants 150 meals a day to be served, then 5 turns would yield a requirement of 30 available seats each. Use this number as a starting point for further analysis as there are more factors to consider.

Delivery makes up <7% in most food halls. Yes, there are outliers, but even pre-pandemic midtown Manhattan saw single digits in this regard. Post pandemic, Politan hasn’t seen much change in this figure. To-go meal volume depends entirely on the location and should be considered unique to the property in question.

Seating types are utilized differently as well. An aesthetically interesting food hall will vary seating types from traditional dining height to bar height to soft seating options. A good rule of thumb is to make sure 15% of your seats are soft seating and 25% of your seats are bar height with the remaining 60% at dining height. There are reasons for this: For example, couches are often the most popular seat in the house for user experience, while bar height tables allow diners to sit above the walking traffic and allow for real estate efficiency around circulation thoroughfares.

There are obvious exceptions: Casinos, college campuses, transit hubs, and suburban setting are examples where one might apply more or less than 30 seats per vendor. Outdoor patios add more variable calculus as well. Finally, the type and volume of alcohol consumption, presence of entertainment, or volume of office workers would cause us to vary these criteria. Lastly, whether or not the food hall serves primarily on disposable containers is yet another variable to consider. You’ll want to “sniff check” your 30 seats based on how you think the space will be utilized. For example, if I had a patio with a view of the rockies, I would count those seats more heavily, then if I had an internal office building courtyard, or if the patio seating was adjacent to a noisy traffic artery. 

This a start, we’re always available if you have more questions!

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Politan Group specializes in operating food halls, bars, and bars within food halls. We also provide remote accounting, HR, and administration for food halls. Finally, we sell software that organizes much of the routine processes. If you are thinking of building a food hall or need help with an aspect of a food hall you already own, reach out to us. Politan is the most-awarded food hall operator in the industry.