Restaurant and cafe table tops in Penge

Yes. Penge is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE20. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Bromley. A controlled parking zone means either a visitor permit sorted in advance or a suspended bay, and a suspension is applied for days ahead rather than on the morning. 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. Delivery is booked to the room, not to a half day. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Boxed sash frames swallow a hundred millimetres of wall on each side of the opening, so the wall between a window and a corner is shorter than a plan makes it look. That measurement comes first: once the gangway is fixed the table dimension follows, and on most of these frontages that means a six hundred millimetre square for two and a seven hundred millimetre round where the room widens towards the back. Old floors fall away and the feet take it up. The stone carries the scribe because the wall cannot be persuaded, so back edges are cut oversize and eased in rather than dropped straight down. 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. Overhang past the plate is where a table tips.

A hall radiator or a coat hook at shoulder height takes a hundred millimetres off the usable width, and a hundred millimetres is often the entire margin. 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. Packaging goes back on the van rather than into the yard. Permit hours are what matters, not the permit itself, because a bay that frees up at six in the evening is no use for a template at ten. 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. Empty frames go back on the van the same trip.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop splashbacks & upstands. That is the local housing talking rather than anything about the job. It is priced, cut and fitted no differently here than anywhere else we cover. A kitchen carved out of a larger room sits under whatever the original plan left behind, so the run frequently ends at a blocked doorway or a boxed-in service. 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. A refit is a resurface where the pedestals are sound. Conversions put kitchens where the services could be made to reach rather than where they belong, so runs are short and interrupted. 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. One set of decisions, repeated across the whole room.

Where the aisle is too tight the usual answer is a reduced-depth top on one side, and a 500mm run is a different cut, a different sink and a different drainer to a 600mm one. 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. Colour is matched across the room, not table by table. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

A room can be out of square in both directions at once, so the wall that leans is also the wall that runs downhill, and one scribe cannot answer both. 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. Radiators and rails cap the depth of a two-seat piece. Send the seating plan with the gangway widths marked, and bring in one of the bases or the maker’s drawing so the bolt centres can be measured properly. One owner can take a date next week while the flat below needs three weeks of notice, so several kitchens in one building end up scheduled by the slowest permission. 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. Written approval before cutting, every time.

A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. An island is where this usually shows, standing free with no wall to level against. Stone does not flex, so a run that rocks on its carcasses rocks just as badly once it is stone. Plaster thickness varies over the height of a wall, so the line at worktop height is not the line at skirting level, and the units decide which one matters. Fixed seating sets the dimension it faces, so a piece against a bench is drawn to the bench instead of to a standard size. An awkward corner takes a made shape.

We seat and seal the sink and hob on the day; water, waste, gas and electrics are for your plumber and electrician. Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. A tap under a window board still needs room for its handle to lift, which is checked at the template. Two parallel runs with a walkway between them is the most efficient shape there is on a slab, because both pieces nest as straight lengths with almost no waste. Rounds waste the corners of their blank where squares do not, so the mix of shapes moves the slab count more than the number of covers does. Veining is laid out so no two pieces read as a pair.

The tap and waste have to be disconnected by a plumber before we start and reconnected once the stone is in. An old stone top is heavier coming out than the new one is going in, and leaves in sections. Carcasses stay. Surface changes. That is the whole of it. Without a bay the van ends up on a single yellow with a crew member watching it, which takes a pair of hands off the carry. Deliveries are timed to the room rather than to the day, so the unload lands between service or before the doors open. A suspension costs less than a lost fit-out morning.

Which side of the bowl they go is about how you stand at the sink, and it is settled before cutting. Where there is no room for a separate drainer, grooves are usually what gets specified instead. The grooves sit inside the depth of the top with stone left either side, so a shallow run limits them. A picture rail, a deep skirting and a moulded architrave all sit in the way of anything that assumes flat wall from floor to ceiling. 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. Every face polished, because a table is looked down on.