Communal restaurant tables

This is the indoor side of the same door: 12 communal tables with wood tops, ten of them solid wood, on cast iron or steel bases. All are listed for indoor use, and four have drop leaves. The first decision is how many guests you want at one table, since that sets the length and everything else follows it.

How many guests share one table

A shared table wins or loses on the length of the edge. Allow about two feet of tabletop for each guest, or a foot and a half when the room is full and friendly. Say a table is 96 inches long. Along one side that is four guests at the generous spacing, five at the tight one. Count both sides and the two ends before you promise a number to the host stand.

Then check the aisle. The walk around a shared table needs about 36 inches for servers, plus the room behind each chair for a guest to stand. A communal table that fits on paper often fails at that second number.

Wood tops, bases and drop leaves

Ten of the 12 tops are listed as solid wood, and two as wood. Bases are cast iron on seven and steel on four. Shapes read rectangular on 11, square on nine and round on four, with drop-leaf tops on four. A solid wood butcher block table at $189 is where the group starts. The range tops out at $515.

Solid wood moves with the room. The limited warranty on solid wood tops runs six months, and the natural movement of solid wood is outside it, which the warranty page explains. Four tables have drop leaves, so the table can shrink on a quiet Tuesday and grow on a full Saturday.

With a drop-leaf top, plan the room for the leaves up, not down. The table that looks neat against the wall on a Tuesday still has to clear the aisle on Saturday.

Planning for everyone at the table

Plan for guests who use a wheelchair before the order goes in. Surface height, knee space and the share of accessible seats are all set by the ADA standards and by local code, so hand your architect the table dimensions early and let them say which tables count.

Not one table here is listed for patio use, so a long shared table for the terrace is a different search. For that, look at patio tables. Indoors, bar-height tables give a standing option and table sets bundle a top and a base. The rest of the family is in tables, and planning help is the next stop for seat counts.