Atmosphere Lighting for Your Restaurant
Choosing the right lighting solutions in your restaurant can make all the difference in your customers’ experience, and is often an after thought when choosing or moving into a restaurant space.
Lighting Expert, Will Shaw of Integrated Surroundings jumps into this episode of The Restaurant Realty in 10 to share his insight on using lighting to create the perfect atmosphere in your restaurant.
What's in this Episode:
Find out how to balance lighting across your restaurant
Discussion on how many lumens create a nice dining environment
Details on how to transition your restaurant from a brighter lunch-time lighting to nice dinner lighting.
PRO-TIP: Avoid a harsh manual transition!
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Read the full interview below:
Michael Carro : 0:01
Welcome to The Restaurant Realty in 10. Ten minutes of uncensored straight talk for restaurant entrepreneurs. Weekly The Restaurant Realty in 10 dives into restaurant operations, facilities, real estate, and investments. Welcome to The Restaurant Realty in 10. Today we're joined by Will Shaw with Integrated Surroundings to talk about lighting in your restaurants. Will Shaw, welcome to the program.
Will Shaw : 0:23
Thanks for having me back.
Michael Carro : 0:24
So listen, well I mean, an architect draws out of space or you take over a second generation space, it's got lights everywhere seems pretty simple to most people. Why would I need a lighting expert to come in and refine my lighting, if it's already in place? Walk me through what Integrated Surroundings would do in that scenario.
Will Shaw : 0:44
So typically, it's one of the overlooked items in a space but it's one of the most critical items to creating a comfortable environment. It's a very, very important part of your space. And really to do that properly. It boils down to a couple things. You need to make sure that you have Appropriate lighting that has good coverage that washes the space appropriately. That accents your artwork, your finishes your details, you know properly and then you know you really want to make sure that your color temperature across the space matches. So a lot of times we go into spaces and you have a recessed can light that is one color temperature, you have a decorative bar light or pendant that's a another color temperature.
Michael Carro : 1:26
Okay, I've seen that.
Will Shaw : 1:27
Right. So if you look across the color spectrum, you know colors of lighting range from 2000 degrees Kelvin to around 5000 degrees, you can go higher but it's not very common. And typically, you know, like an incandescent bulb that we're all used to seeing is around 2800 degrees Kelvin. So orange is a nice glow more appropriate for you know, nighttime, whereas if you shift up the scale towards 5000 degrees, it's you know, brighter whites more sterile a little bit, you know, obnoxious maybe in the evening, so really you kind of want to pick an even color temperature for your recessed lights, your decorative lights test flights and you want to use that for the entire space.
Michael Carro : 2:03
Well, if I'm a restaurant owner, so well, you know, I've got a dimmer switch on these, you know, because obviously at lunchtime, typically your lighting is a little bit brighter than maybe in the evening. And that's one of the things that my wife really does not like is when we go into a restaurant at night in it's too bright, right? So what would you tell a restaurant owner says, Well, hey, I've got a dimmer switch, what are they missing?
Will Shaw : 2:25
Well, they're missing a lot actually. Because, you know, if you have a can light and it's, you know, 5000 degrees and really bright white, and then you have a pendant that's, you know, 3000 degrees and kind of orangey. Number one, your space doesn't look right, right, things are out of balance, right. So you want to make sure that you pick a color like 3500 to 4000 is very common. It accents things really nicely. And then you can dim any of those bulbs, right, you know, to kind of convert from a daytime environment to a comfortable nighttime environment. Now, one thing that's becoming really popular is warm-dim. And so this is, you know, where you take the same light or Right. And it outputs you know, 4000 degrees Kelvin during the day, right? So it's nice and bright looking more like the outside light around you. And then that same bulb goes to a different color temperature at night. Right? So as you dim it down, it gets more warm and more like a candle glow, right, which is what you want, you know, yeah, in a space like that. So those fixtures are typically more expensive. There's a little bit more behind the scenes as far as how do you dim it? How do you tell it you want it to go to a different color, temperature, and things like that. But it truly allows you to use the same light source for day and nighttime without having different things or just dimming the same fixture if you take a 5000 degree, you know, bright white fixture. Okay, that may look okay during the day, and you just dim it right at night. It's still bright white, it's still not appropriate for a nighttime space, right? So that's why warm-dim, you know, and color shift is really kind of a big deal and really an evolving space within our industry.
Michael Carro : 3:53
One of the things you had mentioned earlier was accenting artwork and I find it interesting. So some restaurants will pay a lot of money to an architect to create these great little details within the space. And yet the lighting does not highlight those awesome features. And so really, the inexpensive, by contrast, the inexpensive cost of a certain smart candlelight to accent a great piece that was well thought out by the architect, could be the difference between actually seeing something special and not.
Will Shaw : 4:27
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, light influences, you know, everything that it touches, right. And so if you have a traditional can light, you know, the CRI is going to be below 90. So CRI is color rendering index, okay, and so that's kind of how they measure what colors are affected by the light above it, right. And so the higher the CRI, the more light the more dimensional the piece, the better it's going to look underneath it. So like a museum, you know, that's accenting a very high end piece or an element would have a nice 97 to 99 CRI fixture above it. Okay, so in a restaurant environment, I don't think you know, you'd want to spend that kind of money. But it is, you know, kind of tragic to see a very nice piece of art with a very inexpensive bulb on it that doesn't even cast light properly may have shadows or scalloping across the piece itself, and you can't really appreciate it. So a little bit of thought either on placement, or the type of fixture would really help you showcase those decorative elements in your space.
Michael Carro : 5:28
Awesome. So within the restaurant, are different spaces. Of course, you have the kitchen, which is always light and bright, the dining room, the restrooms, and the bar. So what differences at least in the front of the house between the restaurant and the bar, might you see and then what are you seeing in restrooms and what are you seeing Of course, inside the kitchen, which I've always seen just big two by four fluorescent lights, which of course are affordable and they appear to be practical, but What say you?
Will Shaw : 6:01
Yes, I mean, that's a good point, you know, and each space has to be treated differently. And typically a kitchen is more task lighting, you need to see what you're doing, you need to see the space. And you know, big wash lights, like the LED, you know, strips that look like the big fluorescence are perfectly appropriate for a space like that. But he wouldn't carry that same look into you know, some of the other areas. So, I mean, really the size of the environment, what you're trying to showcase the level of light, you know, you really want to work with a lighting designer that can actually take your floorplan, look at those spaces, the bar area at the front of house, all that and figure out what level of light you need. And so typically, that's measured in candle lumens. Okay, so a lighting designer would take your plan, they would add in the decorative fixtures, adding the recessed lights, adding the test lights, whatever your designer, your architect selected, pick the color temperature for you. You know, apply warm dimming if you want something cool like that. And then they would actually factor in how many fixtures Do you need in that space? Or how many recessed lights do you need in that space to create this amount of foot lumens, right? So typical work surface or a dining table needs about 35 lumens of light to really accurately see your food, you know, see what's around you. You don't want any shadows or big gaps between lighting, you kind of want an even light throughout the space. And then you want decorative items accented above that.
Michael Carro : 7:21
So the last topic that I wanted to ask you about is transitioning from day to evening, and how that is done without necessarily manually doing it. Because, you know, all of a sudden, I'm in the middle of a meal, and we all see the light go from super bright to I mean, it's it's a big significant change. Now, after a couple of couple minutes, it's no big deal but just that drastic ness as opposed to it's a shock during a meal. Not a bad shock, but just it throws you off balance. How would you do that maybe more subtly, and more consistently, day in and day out.
Will Shaw : 8:00
Yeah so I mean you really don't want a manager to have to remember to transition between those time periods right? So you may say, you know at this time of day here's when we do it they may forget get busy be dealing with an issue and not be able to do that right so next thing you know, it's nighttime outside your lights are obnoxious inside and not the environment you want, right. So typically a lighting system has a built in astronomical time clock, okay, and just what that means is it knows the time of day, you know, it knows sunset and sunrise for your area, and then you can program it to do different things based off of that. So typically, in a high end restaurant, you know, two hours before sunset, we may drop the shades on that side of the building. So it filters that light, you know, the heat and the glare coming in that side of the building and makes it comfortable over there, right but somebody's not having to remember to go hit that button to do that. Just doing it. Yeah, same thing for transitioning between day and night and you can do that instead of a sharp, you know, just grabbing the dimmer and pulling it all the way down. systems can actually take them down in certain percentages, right? So you can go on 5% increments where you don't even really notice that sharp change, but all of a sudden, you know, the environment, the space is different. And you've reached the same dimming range. you've just done it slower. So it's not abrupt.
Michael Carro : 9:14
Yeah, love it. Well, that's it for today's podcast. Thank you Will Shaw with Integrated Surroundings for coming in and we look forward to another podcast that we're going to be talking about the system control panel. Thank you for listening to The Restaurant Realty in 10. If you're interested in restaurants, whether operations, facilities, buying, leasing, or investment, The Restaurant Realty in 10 is for you. Please subscribe to this podcast and you can also visit The RestaurantRealty.com for show notes, topics and additional information.