Betsy Berry was certain she’d found the ideal chair for Workshop, Charleston’s first upscale food court. The interior designer wanted to furnish its vast dining area with chairs that would simultaneously convey the cafeteria’s emphasis on handicraft, and stand up to being scooted, shifted, shoved and sat in by dozens of customers over the course of a day.
A spindle-back chair with a beveled seat and single brace bar on which kids could rest their fidgety feet met her requirements, and wasn’t ridiculously expensive. Plus, Berry felt good when she sat in it. Like most chairs purchased for fast-casual restaurants, it wasn’t the chair she’d choose for a three-hour meal, but she figured guests could finish a grilled cheese sandwich or garlic noodle bowl in less time than it would take for them to notice the hardness of the wood, or the frail back support provided by seven vertical rods.
And then Berry, who calls herself petite at 5 feet, 2 inches, asked a man to sit in the chair.
“It was so different,” she says, describing how the chair’s sharp corners poked into her accomplice’s manspread hamstrings. “I never would have known that,” she says. “So we ordered the chairs, and had a woodworker come in and raze the edges.”
With the exception of fried fish takeout windows, hot dog stands and pizzerias with delivery fleets, almost every restaurant in the country can lay claim to at least one chair. And while customers generally don’t pay much attention to them, they’re quick to complain when their sits bones go numb halfway through supper.
“If the chair is not up to snuff, you’re going to hear about it,” says David Thompson, the architect responsible for restaurants including FIG, The Grocery, Indaco and Butcher & Bee. Poorly scaled chairs are to Thompson what bum knees are to orthopedists on their night off: “I’ve had people pull me aside and complain about a chair.”