Side-by-Side Restaurant Seating Enables Solitude, Not Conversation

Side-by-side seating at restaurants — banquette benches where you sit shoulder to shoulder with your companion — is having a moment in design circles. The argument for it sounds immediately reasonable.

You can see your companion's face without the barrier of a table edge. Conversation flows more naturally when you're not locked in eye contact across four feet of plate-ware. It feels intimate, collaborative, less formal than the standard booth.

But this assumes restaurants are still organized around conversation. That the point of dining together is to actually look at and attend to the person beside you. That design should support intimacy. This is not obviously true anymore, and hasn't been for roughly a decade.

When Danny Meyer's Union Square Hospitality Group designed Cynthia in New York in 2022, they studied their own dining patterns. Meyer is a careful observer of restaurant culture. This is the man who built restaurants around the idea that hospitality is the point. But at Cynthia, they chose banquette seating not because it facilitates conversation better. Because it had become the default in restaurants that actually work commercially. Side-by-side seating puts the diner's face into the room. Makes you visible to other diners, to the space itself, part of the composition while your companion becomes one element of the view. It's exposure, not privacy.

It's exposure, not privacy.

The rise of Instagram-era restaurant design moved dining away from conversation toward performance. Optimizing for the photograph, the solo experience of eating something beautiful, the pleasure of being seen consuming the thing. Side-by-side seating accelerates this by removing the friction of maintaining eye contact with one person and replacing it with the ease of being observed by many. When you sit across from someone, there's accountability in the looking. You have to stay present, or they notice. Side-by-side, you can drift, watch the room, phone down into your lap, and the person next to you becomes peripheral. The honest version of the design argument would say this. We built this seating because people don't want to talk to each other anymore. We want to be in public together while remaining essentially alone. Side-by-side seating makes that possible and gives you permission.