Restaurant and cafe table tops in Soho

Yes. Soho is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are W1D, W1F. It is worked on our central London run, along with the rest of Westminster. The van is not staying on a main road for the day, so once the stone is off it goes and parks properly somewhere else. 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. A whole order comes off in one movement wherever it can. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

A basement kitchen has a flagged or concrete floor laid straight onto the ground, so it is solid, cold and rarely within ten millimetres of level. The trade on streets like these sits in a parade of narrow shopfronts, so the dining room is long and thin and the covers are won by the width of the gangway rather than by the size of the room. A rear yard is worth an hour of the day. Window boards and cills stand proud of the plaster, so the back edge of the top has to be plotted to where the units actually sit rather than to the wall. 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. Radiators and rails cap the depth of a two-seat piece.

The measurement that decides everything is the diagonal between the underside of the flight above and the outer edge of the turn below it. 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. The frame needs the clearance the piece does. A red route means no stopping, and no stopping means exactly that, so the stone comes in from a side street or from a bay behind the property. 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. The bases are the heavy pallet, not the tops.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop installation and worktop replacement. That is a point about the buildings round here, not about the job. The quoting, the cutting and the fitting are identical here to anywhere else we work. Kitchens go in near the end of a conversion, behind the plastering and the flooring, by which point the programme has already absorbed whatever slipped earlier. 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 phased opening is planned as a single order. Studio and one-bed conversions put the whole kitchen against a single wall, so the job is one run and everything depends on that one length. 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. The count is agreed before the slab is committed.

An aisle under a metre stops being a working space the moment two people are in it, and the depth of the tops either side is what decides whether that happens. 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. The blank decides the diameter, not the other way round. The material band is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

Where a run finishes into a reveal, the depth of that reveal is taken at worktop height and nowhere else. 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. An awkward corner takes a made shape. 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. Where ownership is split across a building, the common parts belong to someone else and the carry route is negotiated rather than assumed. 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 tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. Where the hob lands is set out against the units and the wall behind, not off the kitchen plan. A dishwasher door on one side and an oven door on the other cannot both stand open in a narrow aisle, so which appliance goes where matters more in this shape than in any other. 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. Mixed sizes are fine; unplanned mixed sizes are not.

Grooves and an undermounted bowl are usually specified together, since the grooves are run to the bowl edge. They read strongly across a dark stone and are nearly invisible on a pale one, so look before deciding. Where there is no room for a separate drainer, grooves are usually what gets specified instead. Ceilings are generous and the rooms are narrow, so the runs are long, the aisle is tight and there is nowhere to stand a slab on edge. 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. Four finished edges and a set of blind holes, and that is the piece.

Our own installers do the carry, so there is nobody in the middle to argue with about it. A dropped pan years later is a different question, and stone is remade rather than filled either way. The workmanship guarantee runs 5 years on every kitchen we fit. There is no leaning a piece against a wall halfway up, so any flight longer than a dozen treads is planned around a rest point on a landing. The bases go in first and are stood where they belong, so nothing heavy is dragged across a floor that has already been finished. A stack of tops is a weight before it is a delivery.

Upstands and splashbacks are templated after the worktop is down and settled, so they are a separate visit. Money does not move until the template is done. The fit follows 5 to 10 working days after the template, and nothing is cut before that visit because nothing is cut from a plan. Suspended timber floors flex underfoot, and anything that moves beneath a unit shows up later as a lipped join. 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. Cut to your bases rather than to a size off a list.