Restaurant and cafe table tops in Mill Hill

Yes. Mill Hill is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are NW7. It is worked on our north London run, along with the rest of Barnet. Where the drive is shared, the half-hour the van spends in the way is agreed with the neighbour in advance rather than apologised for at the time. The bases are the heavy half of the delivery, so the pallet is dealt with first while there are still hands free for it. A shared forecourt is booked rather than chanced. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Doorways are low and narrow, which is a genuine constraint on piece length before anything else is considered. 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. A basement is for prep and not for storing stone. Old breasts carry a bulge low down where the original opening was closed up, and the units stand off it before the stone is measured at all. 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. The base carries the weight and the floor carries the base.

A height barrier on the car park entrance rules out a tail-lift van outright, and the stone then transfers to a trolley at the barrier itself. 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. Nothing is carried past a chair still in the gangway. A step up from the drive to the threshold turns the last two metres into a lift, and a lift is where two pairs of hands become the minimum. 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. Where the van cannot wait, the room has to be ready.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop design & quotation, worktop installation and worktop fabrication. That is a statement about the local housing rather than about the work. It gets quoted, cut and fitted exactly as it would anywhere else on the patch. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. 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. Lead time is the reason the date is set early. Extension kitchens are usually specified long before they are buildable, so the run lengths on the drawing and the run lengths in the room are different numbers. 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. A breakage next winter is a phone call, not a problem.

A downdraught extractor takes a long slot out of the middle of the piece and a motor housing out of the cabinet below it, so what sits under the top is settled before anything is cut. 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. Two-seaters and four-seaters come off one slab run. Material sits between £110 and £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted line by line.

Two alcove pieces will not swap over however similar they look, so they are marked left and right at the bench and stay that way to the van. 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. A shallow room decides the diameter early. 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. Because the money comes out of a household rather than a maintenance budget, phasing is common: tops now, island or splashbacks later, quoted so the second visit still matches the first. The length of the lease is a legitimate reason to specify differently, and nobody should be talked into a decade of surface for five years of trading. Consistency across sites is a decision, not an accident.

What comes out goes by the same route the new stone comes in by, which is why that route is walked before anything is lifted. An old stone top is heavier coming out than the new one is going in, and leaves in sections. The carcasses stay. Only the surface changes. Where the van cannot turn on the plot it has to arrive already facing the right way, so the approach along the street is part of the plan. Deliveries are timed to the room rather than to the day, so the unload lands between service or before the doors open. Deliveries land before the doors open wherever possible.

Sealing is the one maintenance job that genuinely differs by material, and it is worth knowing which you are buying before the slab is chosen. Marble is the one people underestimate. It is porous, like granite, and wants sealing. The bead where the sink and hob meet the stone is siliconed rather than sealed, and wants watching. Lime plaster over rubble moves in and out enough that a single long panel will show a gap somewhere along its length. That is fine, but it has to be drawn: a room of one-offs prices differently from a room of repeats, and the difference is real rather than a markup. Roller shutters and bollards lengthen the carry.

The same firm templates and fits. Nobody else is brought in to install. The fitting itself is one visit: a plain run is a morning, an island with splashbacks takes most of the day. Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. Sliding or folding doors take the whole garden wall, so a long stretch of the room has glass where a wall would otherwise carry the units. What a table top needs from us is a size, a shape and the base plate it has to be drilled to, and very little else. A true circle comes off a machine and never off a hand.

Machining is permanent. If a later kitchen moves the sink, the grooves stay where they were cut. A groove set needs a clear stretch of worktop beside the bowl, so it competes with the run for length instead of being free surface. Grooves are machined into the surface rather than applied to it, so there is nothing to come loose later. A lantern or a rooflight over the room throws raking light across every horizontal surface, which shows a lipped join from the far side of the kitchen. A dining room orders tops in sets, so the question is never one piece but twenty that have to read as one colour. Base spread against top size is checked before a size is agreed.