Lighting and Sound in a Small Café: The Cheap Fixes

There is a particular kind of café that is busy from eight until eleven and then hollows out for the rest of the morning. The coffee is fine. The staff are fine. People come in, get their order, look around for somewhere to settle, and leave with the cup in their hand. Owners usually blame the menu or the location. Far more often it is the room: a ceiling of cold downlights over hard floors and bare walls, which is a perfectly good design for a pharmacy and a bad one for anywhere you want somebody to sit for forty minutes. The fixes are mostly cheap, and almost none of them involve a designer.

The bar and the seating want different light

This is the single most common fit-out mistake in small cafés: one lighting scheme, set at one brightness and one colour, covering a working bar and a sitting area that need opposite things. Your baristas need light they can work under — bright, even, and neutral enough to judge the colour of an extraction and read a ticket. Your customers, two metres away, need light that flatters the room and their own faces. Run both from the same switch and somebody loses. Usually it is the customer, because the bar's requirement is the one that stops work when it isn't met.

The mechanism is colour temperature, and you can read it off the box any bulb comes in: a lower Kelvin number is warmer and yellower, a higher one is cooler and bluer. Warm light over the seating, cooler and brighter over the working bar, and a visible step between the two zones rather than a wash across the whole ceiling. The other number on the box worth looking at is the colour rendering index — the higher it is, the more faithfully the light shows colour, which is the difference between food that looks like food and food that looks grey. Cheap low-CRI lamps are the reason a cake that looked good in the display fridge looks sickly on the table.

Glare, and the menu board nobody reads

Stand where a customer stands when they order, not where you stand when you check the board. Then look up. If there is a downlight reflecting off a glossy board, or a window behind the board putting it in silhouette, half of your customers are not reading it — they are asking the barista what you have, which slows the queue and pushes everyone towards the three things they already know. That is a menu problem caused by a lighting problem, and it is usually solved by moving one fitting, angling it, or swapping the board's finish to something matt. Designing a menu board people actually read covers the rest of it, but no amount of good typography survives a reflection sitting across the middle of it.

Your café isn't loud because of the music

Turn the music down in a hard-surfaced room and it gets quieter for about a minute, until everybody talking realises they can hear each other and adjusts back up. The volume problem is almost never the speakers. It is a room with a tiled floor, a glass front, a plasterboard ceiling and nothing soft in it: every voice, every chair scrape and every steam wand bounces around instead of being absorbed, and the whole room ends up shouting over its own echo. That is why people leave at eleven. Nobody thinks "the reverberation time in here is unpleasant"; they think "I can't concentrate" or "I can't hear my friend", and they finish up early.

The fix is soft mass, anywhere you can get it. Fabric, felt, cork, upholstered banquette seating, a curtain on one wall, a rug under the seating cluster, acoustic panels if the budget stretches — the aim is to break up the parallel hard surfaces facing each other. A grinder and a steam wand are the loudest things you own; if the bar sits in a corner made of two hard walls, it is being amplified by the architecture. Softening the surfaces immediately around the bar usually buys more than anything you do to the speakers.

The cheap fixes, in order

• Split the lighting circuits so the bar and the seating can be set differently, and put the seating on a dimmer. This is an electrician's morning and it changes the room more than anything else on this list.
• Replace the lamps before replacing the fittings — colour temperature and rendering are a bulb decision, not a fixture decision, and swapping lamps costs a fraction of a refit.
• Add a table lamp or two. Light at table height, rather than only from the ceiling, is most of what separates a café people sit in from a café people queue in.
• Kill the glare on the board and the counter by angling or moving a single fitting, or going matt.
• Put something soft on the biggest bare wall and under the seating cluster.
• Felt pads on every chair leg. Trivial, cheap, and it removes the noise customers complain about most.

Light also decides how your café photographs

Every customer carries a camera and some of them are your cheapest marketing. A room lit only by cold overhead downlights produces grey, shadowed, unflattering photographs no matter how good the flat white is, and no filter rescues it. A café with one well-lit table near a window or a warm wall gets photographed constantly, because people instinctively sit where they look good. That is worth engineering on purpose — and it applies just as much to the pictures you take yourself for your own listings, which is what shooting your own food photographs is about.

Where MidaOne fits

No till system fixes a room. What it can do is tell you whether the room is the problem. MidaOne shows sales by hour and by day, so the eleven o'clock cliff stops being a feeling and becomes a line you can watch — and when you change the lighting, add the soft surfaces or split the circuits, you can see whether that hour actually recovers over the following weeks rather than guessing. Sales by item over the same period tells you whether a fixed menu board started selling more of what it advertises. It's all in the flat AED 200 a month, on devices you already own. Worth noting that lighting is also one of the larger controllable lines on a café's electricity bill, which cutting a café's energy bill goes into properly.

Frequently asked questions

Spend an evening in your own café after close with the lights on the setting customers get, sitting at the worst table rather than the best one. Most of what is wrong with a room announces itself in about ten minutes, and most of it costs less to fix than a week's coffee.