Aren't there some cheap ways to muffle sound?
Wood floors, rugs, curtains, artwork, acoustic panels, etc.
Wood floors, rugs, curtains, artwork, acoustic panels, etc.
With, floors hardwood is a hard surface (so only mildly sound damping) so they're not too bad for cleaning and health stuff, but are expensive to install and take a lot to maintain if the worn-in look doesn't fit the aesthetic. Low-pile carpets can be shampood inexpensively for medium-term maintenance and replaced comparatively cheaply in the long run, but take a lot more effort to keep clean when someone drops a catering tray full of crème caramel and something with a port wine reduction.
Artwork: anything that you'd want hanging on your walls is either going to need to be a print or covered with glass or plastic because it will get ruined otherwise.
Acoustic panels are usually pretty ugly, difficult to clean, not resistant to pests, are a fire liability if coated in grease, etc.
Curtains definitely are definitely viable, but if you've got enough of them to really impact the sound level, they probably need to be expensive ones, and expensive curtains can't just be tossed in the wash and pressed on an ironing board.
It's not like they aren't effective, they're just not nearly as easy to deploy or maintain as they are in homes or offices.
I've proudly convinced so many people to not go into that business, though I've also convinced a few people to give it a shot. It's not a good choice for most people, but some people can't really do much else and be happy. In many ways, its especially tolerant to neurodivergent folks with different skillsets being downright useful in different roles. It's hard as hell though. There's a good reason that CIA (the school, not the spies) requires 6 months of full-time back-of-the-house restaurant work to get admitted to their degree program.
They are also out of vogue as was mentioned, unless you’re a coffee shop then these “cozy” items just aren’t as common right now.
Essentially, the louder the noise floor, the louder the signal has to get to be intelligible at every table, which raises the noise floor, creating a feedback loop. Good acoustic design in a space accounts for this by minimizing how much acoustic energy is present in the room - both by removing it (with acoustic treatment), spreading it away from sources (by isolating tables/booths, using hard surfaces to reflect sound away, etc), and preventing it from being created in the first place. For example, keeping bus stations behind galley doors and training staff not to clink silverware/glasses/dishes when filling bus bins and avoid playing loud music, etc.
In my experience, most restaurants fail at this because all the people who do it well are in the high-end restaurant business, which most restaurants are not. If the key to a space that isn't too loud is to limit the number of patrons, have dining room space allocated to treatment between tables, have highly trained staff with consistent management, and a big enough kitchen space with heavy enough doors to isolate the sound within - your only option is to be a high end restaurant.
But the high end places fail at it because they don't care and want to maximize the guest throughput because their margins still suck.
Low-end places are often even more carefully designed, though, but they're designed for different things: high turnover and low staff wages, meaning simple, flat, easy-to-clean (and sanitize), nearly-zero-maintenance surfaces like bare laminated tabletops and quarry tiles. Especially once you start moving into fast casual, they want their diners comfortable enough to enjoy their meal, but not comfortable enough to linger, which is often a tough balance to strike.
The look of high-end places is like putting your sales people in nice suits. I don't think most places are trying to maximize throughput-- if they're not completely booked at least a few nights per week they're probably not staying open-- I think they're trying to maximize check averages. Nothing inspires "maybe I'll get the dry aged wagyu app and flip to the expensive page in the wine list tonight" thoughts like a luxe dining room.
dampen means to make something wet, or at least originally that's what it meant