Article
How to Control Noise In Your Restaurant
Just like a weed can be defined as a plant growing where it's not wanted, noise is just sound that is undesirable for a given circumstance. Here are some strategies for weeding out the noise, and keeping the rest of the house humming.
Man, it's gotten loud in here!
Professional restaurant reviewers, academic researchers and dining patrons of all stripes have reached the same conclusion: Today's restaurants are uncomfortably and in some cases dangerously loud. Newspaper articles are filled with handwringing about pervasive restaurant noise while acoustical consultants make ominous predictions about your restaurant's potential profitability if their services are not retained during your buildout.
And yet noise control is not nearly as complicated nor expensive to obtain as it may appear. The key to controlling sound in restaurants is to understand why noise happens and then how to design it out.
What's Noise?
Just like a weed can be defined as a plant growing where it's not wanted, noise is just sound that is undesirable for a given circumstance. Humans evolved to be pretty good interpreters of sound because in the past being able to hear and understand sound was vital to survival. Sound let us determine what unseen threats might be nearby and controlling the sound around us allowed us to sneak up on prey and be more effective hunters.
This was all well and good when sounds came solely from nature. But today it is virtually impossible to escape man-made sound, even in the most remote areas of the country. In most places we go, there are dozens if not hundreds of sources of sound that one can discern at any given moment. The more sounds there are in an environment, the harder it is for us to extract meaning from a particular sound source.
When we aren't able to isolate meaningful content from what we hear because there are just too many sound sources and/or one or more sound sources exceed comfortable levels, we call the result "noise." What's more, if the sound that reaches us becomes too loud, the result can be physical damage: You might recall that disconcerting buzzing you had in your ears when you last went to hear a band play at your favorite venue.
And as with so many things, getting older makes things worse. Over the years our ability to distinguish sound sources from one another and to process large volumes of auditory information diminishes. And no, it's not just the over-55 set that has this problem: Sound processing deficits can start much, much earlier, especially in those who were exposed to very high levels of noise in their younger years which is, let's face it, most of us.
So unless your restaurant is catering to unaccompanied minors, noise control should be on your agenda.
Sources of Restaurant Noise
Most noise complaints in restaurant reviews suggest that patrons think noisy restaurant dining rooms are solely the result of sounds coming from other customers. To some extent that is true. Restaurants are social settings and diners will raise their voices to be heard by their companions if there are sufficiently competitive sound sources nearby, which may give the impression that the surrounding noise is all coming from human speech.
Hard surfaces reflect as much as 95 percent of the sound waves that strike them, sending those waves bouncing around your space and mingling with new sources of sound as they go.
But restaurant sound sources are much more diverse than just conversations or the occasional bursts of laughter or singing. Tableware clinking, employee conversations, banging and whirring from open kitchens and bars, thumping music, clicking footsteps, chairs and tables scraping along the floor -- all of this creates noise that can be reduced with good planning.
Getting control of noise in your restaurant begins with assessing your décor. Restaurant designs that emphasize hard floor finishes in lieu of carpets, exposed tabletops instead of table linens, and expanses of glass instead of curtains likely mean that your operation's interior design could be an important part of the problem.
Hard surfaces reflect as much as 95 percent of the sound waves that strike them, sending those waves bouncing around your space and mingling with new sources of sound as they go. This reverberating sound is the main source of the noise problem in modern restaurants. Sound levels continue to escalate as the room fills with more and more sounds in various stages of decay, and patrons have to speak louder and louder to be understood above the din. This is a perfect recipe for sound overload.
But a cutting-edge design may be an important component of your restaurant's intended experience. No restaurateur wants to create a "dead" environment -- some degree of acoustical liveliness is important to generating the happy "buzz" of a full restaurant.
You do not necessarily have to sacrifice sleek design or an active open kitchen to have an acoustically functional dining room if you apply a little sound-deadening know-how during the design process.
The 'Shoebox' Effect
The first order of business in controlling noise in your new restaurant is to reduce what I'll call the "shoebox" effect. Consider a typical vanilla-box commercial space in a strip mall, ready for buildout. It's probably made up of six flat planes -- four walls, a ceiling and a floor -- just like a shoebox. Those six planes act as launching pads for sound waves as they bounce from flat surface to flat surface, only slightly diminishing with each bounce.
So try to reduce the number of parallel flat surfaces by breaking up those six planes. Have your contractor build out alcoves along your perimeter walls or by providing partition walls in larger spaces.
These smaller wall surfaces placed at right angles to the major planes in your restaurant will help break up sound waves so that they decay more quickly. They also offer the bonus of a more appealing seating environment, as most guests strongly prefer sitting next to some kind of architectural feature rather than at a table that is exposed on all four sides out in the dining floor, and diners love to be seated in a cozy nook on the edge of but not right in the middle of the action.
Apply the same design logic on the ceiling: coffers, soffits and other built effects that break up your ceiling will increase the number of potential surfaces for breaking up sound and will help noise decay faster. Even though a typical ceiling of acoustic tiles laid in a metal grid can help a bit by offering more sound absorption than a plain drywall ceiling, you'll get increased benefits by adding some depth and variety to the ceiling plane no matter what it is made of.
Next, select some form of soft finish for two adjacent planes in your space. Back to the shoebox analogy for a moment: If any two adjacent sides of the shoebox are treated with sound-absorbent materials, you'll "trap" the sound waves and greatly reduce the amount of residual sound that is bounced to other parts of the space. In the old days, restaurants used carpeting on the floor and heavy curtains on the windows to get this effect, and it worked like a charm.
But today's restaurantgoer prefers a more streamlined décor and restaurant operators hate the costly maintenance of carpets and drapes, so you'll need to get a bit more creative with the softer materials you choose for this purpose.
Sound Softeners
Fabric is a perennial favorite: Drape it in the ceiling, have it made into hanging wall art, or cover your banquettes with it. You can also go with commercial acoustical materials that come in easily mounted panels or that can be fashioned into ceiling coffers and other decorative elements on two adjacent surfaces to capture sound waves and reduce reverberation.
Many restaurant operators try applying sound-absorbing materials to the underside of tables and chairs as another way of reducing dining room noise. Alas, you are probably wasting your money, as any sound reduction you obtain from putting foam under your tables is likely to be minimal. That's because most of the sound in your restaurant is probably being generated at or above tabletop height.
Sure, any sound waves that reflect off the floor and bounce up into sound-deadening material on the underside of your tables will be largely absorbed by the time they get there, but those sound waves first had to bounce around above the floor surface, where guests can hear and be bothered by them. It's probably better to spend your money on wall and ceiling treatments than on underside foams or panels.
But tables do have a role to play in noise control. Consider your tabletop. It's clear that table linens are both costly and out of fashion for all but the most luxurious restaurants, but you may find placemats to be an acceptable alternative depending on your concept. You can find dozens of different placemat styles and price points and they don't have to be printed with tacky ads or children's games (although lots of adults I know love paper placemats covered in puzzles or coloring opportunities).
Correctly matched to your concept, placemats can be branding opportunities, conversation starters, and Instagram fodder. Regardless of what they look like, placemats help reduce tabletop noise and in a modest way also help absorb sound waves from other sources in your dining room.
Curbing Cleaning Clatter
Moving away from décor, think about what equipment you are placing in the front of the house and how it can affect sound levels. A common source of noise is bar equipment, notably ice machines and under-bar glasswashers. I have long been an advocate of having an adjacent "back room" next to the bar for locating the ice machine to minimize both the sound of compressors and ice falls as well as to reduce heat behind the bar while still having ice close at hand rather than relying on a bar-back to bring it from the kitchen.
In your open kitchen, you'll certainly want some sounds to be heard, like the sizzle of items on the grill. What you probably don't want is a lot of banging, so train your kitchen team to place rather than throw down sauté pans.
If it's feasible, consider handling most glass washing in the kitchen and doing only a few items as needed at the bar. You will have to install a three-compartment sink at your bar anyway in most jurisdictions, so have your bartender use these sinks to manually wash any glassware from patrons seated at the bar and have the rest of the glassware delivered to the kitchen warewashing area by servers or bussers when they clear tables.
This also means that you need to think through how clean glassware will be returned to your bar, by whom and how often. In a larger operation, it may not be feasible to be running clean glass racks to the bar during service, but if your bar operation has high enough volume to make glass restocking a problem, then it's probably large enough to justify placing glass washing in the same "back room" that holds your ice machine.
Put all that noisy, heat- and steam-generating equipment out of sight and where you can more easily manage the sounds they make. You can also use this "back room" space for storing extra beverage inventory and items that are either used relatively infrequently or are too ugly to be on display (I'm looking at you, liquor dispensing systems).
In your open kitchen, you'll certainly want some sounds to be heard, like the sizzle of items on the grill. What you probably don't want is a lot of banging, so train your kitchen team to place rather than throw down sauté pans.
Ask your contractor and ventilation vendor to work together to ensure that your exhaust fans over the cooking line are well-balanced before you open, and select refrigeration equipment with high-quality compressors that don't make a lot of noise when they kick in. You can also place high-speed prep equipment such as blenders on sound-isolation bases to reduce vibration and the resulting noise -- even putting a folded kitchen towel under your mixer or cutting boards can help a bit.
Retrofitting to Reduce Restaurant Noise
Perhaps you didn't discover a noise problem in your restaurant until after it was built. While it can be expensive or impractical to make major physical changes to the design to reduce noise at this point, there are a few less costly steps you can take to deaden sound and make the space more acoustically comfortable.
The first approach to consider is applying acoustic panels to ceiling and/or wall surfaces. These panels are produced by a number of commercial firms and can be any size or shape, although you may have seen the common 2-by-2-foot panels almost invisibly deployed on the ceiling in many chain restaurants.
Acoustic panels are simply planes of sound-absorbing material that are lightweight and that can be applied to any surface to capture a much higher proportion of sound waves than a hard surface can -- as much as 80 percent of sound hitting one of these panels is absorbed, greatly reducing reverberation. Some manufacturers can produce these panels with custom finishes that allow them to look like artwork or branding elements, so that the panels become an integral part of your décor rather than being unnoticed on the ceiling.
It's easy to find these panels from online vendors, and they vary in price from $5 to $15 per square foot. These can be installed yourself over a weekend. So with just a few thousand dollars and a bit of effort, you can make a notable reduction in your restaurant's noise levels. Do make sure that you select panels that are fire-rated and designed for commercial use, and that you purchase from a reputable vendor.
For even greater noise reduction, you can spend a bit more money and time to get suspended "cloud" acoustic panels. These work better than standard ceiling- or wall-mounted panels because they have two sides for absorbing sound waves; sound coming up from below gets absorbed by the lower surface of the panel, while sound waves that bounce off the ceiling get captured by the panel's upper surface. These take more precision to mount but can be highly effective.
And although you may have seen sculpted foam panels used in recording studios to dampen noise, don't choose these for your restaurant. Foam is extremely hard to keep clean, is not likely to be fire-safe, and actually might be too sound-deadening for restaurant use.
The Upshot: 55 to 65 Decibels Is Your Sweet Spot
You want a warm, convivial level of sound in your restaurant to attract diners -- remember, people are social animals and far more prefer to go to restaurants that are busy -- and to provide some auditory "cover" that creates a sense of privacy for guest conversations. This means sound levels of about 55-65 decibels, which you can easily measure using any number of free sound meter smartphone apps.
One Person's Music Is Another Person's Noise
Music becomes noise when it interferes with desired activities, and it's worth remembering that those activities should be the ones desired by your customers, not your staff.
Many restaurants abdicate the selection and playing of recorded music to staff members who tend to play what they like at volumes that help them stay energized throughout the shift. This may sound good in theory but the result is often music that is inappropriate for the experience you are trying to create and that adds to uncomfortable noise levels.
Restaurateurs also tend to reduce initial capital costs by skimping on the sound system they install, getting something inexpensive off the rack and mounting it themselves (or getting their speaker-head bartenders to do it). Speaker placement and sound control is an art form, and whenever possible engage a professional to help you position sound system components based on the layout and finishes in your completed floorplan.
Make sure you have a method and a policy for controlling music volume and choose music that enhances your concept and makes your guests comfortable. Periodically check your music volume so that it doesn't start creeping up past about 60 decibels.
Many cooks like to listen to music when they're working. And why not? A lot of professionals like to hear their favorite songs to keep them relaxed and focused, including surgeons. In the restaurant, the problem is the music can often be loud and carry into the dining room. You need to establish your music policy early and make sure your kitchen hires understand it. You don't want it to be a morale problem, and if no music in the back of the house is a deal-breaker, make sure it is an issue during the interview process.
Always remember: The dining experience in your restaurant should be about your customers, not about you and your auditory tastes. Sure, some "rock star" chefs play fast and loose with this principle by playing loud music that might seem incongruous with $35 entrées, but a restaurant that keeps guests coming back week after week because they are comfortable and can enjoy the company of their fellow diners is more likely to be profitable in the long run. Managing sound levels through good design and smart operations will go a long way to getting you there.
How Loud Is It In Here?
How loud is your restaurant? Well, it has become a cliché by now, but yes -- "there is an app for that." In fact, there are several. One website that provides information on sound level meters that can be uploaded to your mobile device is:
http://www.healthyhearing.com/report/47805-The-best-phone-apps-to-measure-noise-levels.
How to Reduce Restaurant Noise
A normal night out to eat might be one of the things we all miss most about pre-COVID life. But what I definitely don't miss is being in overcrowded restaurants where I have to yell across the table so the people I'm with can hear me. Restaurants are put in a very difficult position of wanting to provide patrons with an intimate and comfortable space to dine, while also needing to maximize the number of diners per square foot to turn a profit.
https://www.secondskinaudio.com/acoustics/restaurant-noise-reduction/
