I’m looking up photos of restaurants 40+ years ago and struggling to find any obvious acoustic differences in their designs (I do notice carpet seems more prominent?) Do you have any examples of what they used to do better?
They went with easy to clean floors and took out the acoustic tiles leaving the ceilings and air handling systems bare and echoic.
In fancy buildings you also had a lot of decorative wood and molding breaking up the sound. And those embossed tin tiles, covered with a few layers of paint.
For a while during covid, a place I would go to on occasion had full-height plexiglass dividers between each booth. It made such a huge difference in noise, I was sad when they got rid of them.