Restaurant and cafe table tops in Chalk Farm

Yes. Chalk Farm is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are NW1, NW3. It is worked on our central and north London run, along with the rest of Camden. A single red line has hours and a double red line does not, and the difference decides whether an early start is a plan or a penalty. A table order comes off the van as a stack of frames and a pallet of bases, and both of those need somewhere to stand before either is moved. The pavement stays walkable while the frames come off. You never have to visit anything or collect anything: we template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen.

The kitchen is often on the first floor above the garage, so everything goes up a staircase built into a very narrow plan. Hospitality in an area like this is usually a converted house or an old inn, so the dining space is several small rooms rather than one, and each room takes a different table size. Old floors fall away and the feet take it up. Alcove pieces get cut oversize on both scribe edges, with the true wall angles carried on the template drawing rather than assumed. None of that is scribed against on a table, since it stands clear of every wall, so the awkwardness moves from the back edge to the floor and the base. Nothing is scribed, because nothing meets a wall.

A carpeted hall runs a trolley badly, so a heavy piece is carried rather than rolled from the threshold in. A table order is many small pieces rather than one long one, so the route decides how many trips the delivery takes rather than how big anything can be. Pieces come off the van in the order the room fills. Where a marked loading box sits on the red route the stop is legal but timed, so the unload runs as one movement with every hand on it. Where the standing is short the pieces are counted off at the tail lift against the plan rather than checked once they are already inside. One stop, and the count is proved before we leave.

Not especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop installation. It is a fact about the local housing rather than about the work. The job is quoted, cut and fitted the same way wherever on the patch it lands. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. Table work arrives as a batch by its nature, and a batch means one slab run rather than the same colour ordered twice a year apart. Turnover between operators rarely changes the pedestals. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. A room opening in a second phase is worth naming now, while the material is still on the ground and a match is a telephone call. Match it now or hunt for it later.

The catch with a galley is that both runs are seen end-on from the doorway, so any difference in overhang between the two reads immediately. A table top answers to none of that, since it meets no wall and needs no scribe, but the pieces come off the same slab as the counter and the colour has to carry across both. A circle wastes its corners, and the quote says so. Material alone is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are never folded into that figure.

Where a breast interrupts a long wall the join can often go there, so it reads as a natural break rather than a line in the middle of a worktop. A column, a boxed duct or a fixed bench in a dining room is designed around with a shape cut to suit rather than notched on site. Levelled at the feet, never packed under the stone. Send a plan of each room with its table sizes against it, and say which covers are outdoors so the material can be split before anything is priced. Flats bought out of managed stock keep the original kitchen dimensions long after the ownership changed, so the layout says very little about who is paying for the work. A table top bolted to a base you already own is loose furniture rather than a fixture, so it leaves with the operator at the end of a term. The invoice and the approval carry the same name.

The fitting itself is one visit: a plain run is a morning, an island with splashbacks takes most of the day. The template is taken in your kitchen after the units are in and fixed, never before. The template produces a drawing, and the workshop cuts to that drawing once you agree it. The range sits in a former chimney opening, so the pieces either side of it are short, unequal and cut to brickwork rather than to a module. Table tops sit outside all of that, because a top touches no wall at all and every one of its edges is profiled, polished and on show. The stone is straightforward and the base fixing is the job.

If a piece cannot be got in at all, we say so at the template rather than on the day. The lift, if there is one, is measured on the diagonal, because that is the dimension a long piece actually uses. Splitting a run costs a join, and that is the price of getting stone into the room at all. The hall is the only way in and out for whoever lives there, so it is cleared and then kept clear for as long as pieces are moving. Tops travel upright in a padded frame, and it is the frame rather than the person carrying it that has to clear the tightest turn. A trolley run across a forecourt gets boarded like any other.

What is quoted is what the drawing says, and the figure does not move unless the drawing does. Taking the old tops away is a line rather than an assumption, so it comes off if you do not want it. The quote is written from the template drawing. Before that it works from what you have described. The returns into a breast recess are the tightest scribes in the room, and they are eased in rather than forced. Where a floor falls away, the levelling is done by winding out the feet under each base rather than by packing anything under the stone. A pedestal is checked for spread before a size is agreed.

Two bowls means two cut-outs and a bridge of stone between them, which decides where the sink can go. Each cut-out is priced on its own line, so a range, a bowl and a half, a boiling tap and a drainer are four items rather than one. Galley runs are usually short enough to come out of a single slab, so the material band you choose does more to the total than the room shape does. What decides the cut list here is the seating plan rather than the room shape, and one repeated table size nests far better than six one-offs. Rectangles nest and rounds do not.