How to Choose the Right Flooring for Your Restaurant

Restaurant flooring has to do something almost impossible: look beautiful enough to impress your guests while surviving years of heavy foot traffic, dropped plates, spilled wine, dragged furniture, kitchen grease, and daily mopping.

Choose the wrong floor and you'll be replacing it within two years. Choose the right one and it'll still look great a decade from now.

Here's what you need to know.

The Three Things That Matter Most

Every flooring decision comes down to three factors:

• Durability: can it handle the daily punishment a restaurant delivers?
• Safety: is it slip-resistant, especially when wet?
• Aesthetic: does it fit the look and feel of your space?

Get all three right and you've nailed it. Compromise on any one and you'll regret it.

Your Options

Porcelain & Ceramic Tiles

The most popular choice for restaurants, and for good reason. Porcelain tiles are incredibly hard-wearing, water-resistant, and available in hundreds of styles. You can get tiles that look like wood, stone, marble, or concrete at a fraction of the cost.

Our recommendation: porcelain tiles with a matt or textured finish are the safest, most versatile option for most restaurants.

Engineered Wood & Parquet

Nothing beats the warmth and character of real wood. Engineered wood (real wood veneer on a plywood base) gives you the look without the instability of solid wood in a humid restaurant environment. Parquet patterns like herringbone add serious style points.

Polished Concrete

Industrial, modern, and practically indestructible. Polished concrete works brilliantly in casual dining, cafés, and bars. It's seamless (no grout lines to maintain) and can be stained or dyed to match your color scheme.

Luxury Vinyl Tile (LVT)

The budget-friendly option that's come a long way in recent years. Modern LVT can convincingly mimic wood, stone, and tile. It's soft underfoot, water-resistant, and easy to replace if damaged.

Kitchen vs Dining Room

These are two completely different environments and they need different floors.

Kitchen floors must be non-slip, waterproof, grease-resistant, and easy to deep clean. Safety-rated porcelain or commercial-grade vinyl are the standard choices. Never use wood in a kitchen.

Dining room floors can prioritise aesthetics more, but don't ignore practicality. Whatever you choose needs to handle chairs being dragged, wine being spilled, and daily mopping.

The transition between kitchen and dining room flooring matters too. A clean, well-finished threshold makes the difference between "professional" and "afterthought."

What We Tell Our Clients

After fitting floors in restaurants across London, here's our honest advice:

• Spend more on flooring than you think you need to. Cheap floors in a restaurant don't last. It's a false economy.
• Always get samples into the actual space. Flooring looks completely different under restaurant lighting than it does in a showroom.
• Think about noise. Hard floors amplify sound. In a small dining room, that can go from "buzzy atmosphere" to "can't hear each other" very quickly.
• Plan for the joins. Where your kitchen floor meets your dining floor, where tile meets wood, where the bar area transitions. These details separate a polished build from a rushed one.
• Talk to your builder before you order. We've seen owners buy flooring that doesn't work with their subfloor, their heating system, or their timeline. A quick conversation can save thousands.