Reviews of The Independent in Georgetown, S.C., were largely favorable when it opened in early 2024: Customers said the food was great, the ambiance appealing. There was just one problem: The restaurant was too loud.
“It was ruining evenings out and causing people to not choose us again,” said Gabriel Perez, chief operating officer, The Indigo Road Hospitality Group, based in Charleston, S.C.
So Indigo Road added acoustic panels to the ceiling which “look like part of the design and are not an eyesore,” Perez said.
And the difference in the sound was “night and day,” he added. “Sound mitigation is extremely important for the experience.” It wasn’t an inexpensive thing to fix, he said, but what Indigo Road paid was completely worth it.
As a rule, Indigo Road takes great care when opening restaurants that the sound and lighting are both at correct levels. Good acoustic features, Perez said, are easy to interweave with the design from the beginning and “can be seamless from a visual perspective.” The company just missed the mark, initially, with The Independent.
Acoustics should be considered from the very beginning of a restaurant's design process, said Matt Edgar, visionary, Pineapple Audio, Chicago. “Too often, acoustic treatment gets bolted on after the design is finished, and you can tell,” he said. “It ends up looking like an afterthought."
Sound Mitigation
A simple way to decrease the noise in a restaurant is to add softness like upholstered seats, banquettes, absorbent wall coverings, curtains, carpet inlays (in restaurants, not bars) and recessed rugs.
And when it comes to finishes, a little flair can help drop sound levels. A scalloped knob, for example, refracts sound better than a truly flat finish.
Screens above banquettes can have a dual purpose, said Ryan Petyak, partner, //3877, a design firm in Washington, D.C. They prevent sound waves from traveling and also create more intimacy within the booth so guests naturally keep their voices lower. Designers can even add an element above a booth, like a dropped ceiling or a pendant light, which accentuates the intimacy and can also have sound-absorbing qualities.
At Tamba in Las Vegas, owner Sunny Dhillon padded the underneath of all dining room tables with acoustic panels to stop the sounds on the highly reflective terrazzo floors from echoing across the room. “We created a very dampening environment,” he said.
Noise Abatement
Sound traveling outside the restaurant, to adjacent businesses, apartments above or even bleeding out onto the street in a residential neighborhood, also needs to be considered.
“We ask questions early on about noise tolerance with other tenants,” Petyak said. Acoustic ceilings are very expensive, he pointed out, and hard to coordinate with architecture and design but they’re even harder to install if they’re not put in early.
Another way to decrease sound escaping is to factor in air gaps. “Air is your best friend,” Petyak said, and he often builds in a double wall with a one-inch air gap, which is very effective.
These air gaps can also be incorporated into ceilings, and they’re very costly, he said, though very effective. And they need spring isolator clips that connect dropped ceilings to the ceiling above and create the gap. “The clips cost so much money and you need hundreds of them, but they really do work,” he said.
The ceiling is the largest, flattest surface in the room, so it's where you get the most acoustic payoff, Edgar said. “Picture it as a mirror: Every clink of a fork and every conversation hits it and bounces right back down."
For ceilings, he likes inexpensive two-inch, black-faced, rigid fiberglass boards, that absorb a lot of sound but can only be applied to black ceilings.
Other materials Edgar likes are PET acoustic panels, made from recycled polyester fiber sourced from plastic bottles. These come in different thicknesses and can be cut into shapes or printed with custom images so they continue the restaurant’s branding or story-telling and can be applied to walls or ceilings.
An alternative to putting acoustic treatments on a high ceiling is to drop the ceiling, Petyak said, if it works with the design concept and is treated with appropriate materials. Everyone wants a vast open ceiling with beautiful finishes but sometimes you have to do a drop ceiling to minimize costs.” Dropping the ceiling can decrease the reverberation of sound throughout the space, he pointed out.
Music to their Ears
Music adds greatly to a restaurant’s ambiance. And while restaurant operators typically want to keep some sounds down, they want the sound level of the music to be perfect, especially since many of them buy expensive curated playlists.
Restaurants want different things from their music, Edgar said. “Some want it in the background at a lower volume, which makes the acoustics more important and often calls for more speakers, so the sound stays even and present without ever getting loud. Others want the music in the foreground at a higher volume, which can mean fewer speakers doing more of the work.”
But speaker placement and quantity matter, he explained. “Some people assume more speakers means more control, but that can backfire. When a guest hears music coming from several speakers at once, it sounds muddy and unclear.”
Speakers hanging from ceilings is not a good idea, he said, because guests’ ears aren’t on the top of their heads and the music comes straight down and bounces off the hard floor. A better option is to place speakers at a 45-degree angle.
A Musical Hug
When Denver-based TAG Restaurant Group designs a new restaurant it considers how the music and the sounds of the diners will be controlled “synchronously,” said CEO James Park. “I want the music to hug a guest, then they feel like they’re someplace special.”
At TAG restaurants the music transitions throughout the space. At the entrance it’s “critically important,” to welcome guests into the space, he said, so they keep the base down and turn up the mid- and high-range frequencies “so guests feel that rich warmth of the base but it’s not overwhelming because we have to communicate effectively here.” This continues at the bar, he said, because it’s often a transition into the restaurant and mid-ranges are usually accentuated here with tweeters.
Sunny Dhillon opened Tamba in December 2024 and wanted a top-notch sound system with nothing visible so he mudded the speakers into the drywall and layered it with diffusion materials. The sub-woofers and acoustic panels are also within the walls. The walls themselves are a custom concrete and carbon fiber composite for sound diffusion. And the walls are fluted with soft, rounded radiuses, “so instead of bouncing sound straight back into the room they break it up and diffuse it,” Dhillon explained.
This would have been impossible to install after the restaurant was built, he pointed out, and the music is very important to the ambiance at Tamba. “We only play North Indian music, which gives us a very distinct identity,” he said.
The key has been the diffusion of the sound, he said, but also the simplicity of the system and the fact that it’s invisible. “We have a $170,000 sound system and you can’t see a single speaker; it’s quiet luxury and we wanted to very much make it about the food.”
Some restaurants emphasize their speakers, said Edgar, and often they’ll wrap them with custom finishes or match them to the veneer on other millwork in the space. This can elevate the music programming of a restaurant, he said. And these definitely don’t look like an afterthought.
"As more operators invest in good acoustics, the right music for the space, and a quality sound system to deliver it, guests will gravitate toward those restaurants,” Edgar said. “They may not be able to say why; they'll just know they want to come back."