Restaurant and cafe table tops in St Johns

Yes. St Johns is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE8, SE4. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Lewisham. Plenty of zones run at the weekend as well as through the week, so a Saturday date is not automatically the easier one to work. 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 rear door swings inward across the end of the run, so the last few hundred millimetres of worktop are only reachable with the door shut. 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. Converted houses mean several sizes, not one. Where a corner is a couple of degrees off, a mitre cut to a theoretical ninety degrees opens on the wall side and there is no closing it afterwards. 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 hall that widens further in is still only as good as its tightest point, and that point is usually within a metre of the front door. 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. A cellar stair is not a route for stone. A permit covering the street is permission to park rather than a space reserved on it, and on a full street the difference is the whole morning. 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 really, and claiming otherwise would cost nothing and mean nothing. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop fabrication. It reflects the local housing rather than any difference in the work. It is quoted, cut and fitted here the same way it is anywhere else on the patch. An open-plan extension puts the worktop in the middle of the living space, so it is looked at from the sofa as well as worked on. 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 trial piece before a large order is money well spent. Extension budgets are usually well spent by the time the worktop is ordered, which is where the choice between quartz and a thinner sintered stone actually gets made. 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. Orders are counted in pieces and never in metres.

The wall between the original room and the return usually carries a steel, and the plaster line above it steps, so anything full height behind the run is measured separately from the top. 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. The blank decides the diameter, not the other way round. Material alone is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are never folded into that figure.

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. A shallow room decides the diameter early. 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. 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. Ten years of service is a different specification entirely.

The alternative stands on the surface, so the choice is losing worktop permanently or only while you are draining. The grooves sit inside the depth of the top with stone left either side, so a shallow run limits them. They are cut with a fall towards the bowl, which is why they cannot be added on site later. Original quarry tile is often still down under two or three later floor coverings, which is why the finished floor height is rarely what anyone expects. 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. Cut to your bases rather than to a size off a list.

A remake goes back through the same cutting and polishing, so it is a return visit rather than a patch. Floors and units are protected before anything comes through the door. Door frames and the stair route are protected too, since most contact happens on the way in. A front path with a gate and a turn or two adds handling before the door is even reached, and every handling movement is another chance to catch a corner. 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. Tops travel upright in a frame, faces apart.

The template produces a drawing, and the workshop cuts to that drawing once you agree it. The fitting itself is one visit: a plain run is a morning, an island with splashbacks takes most of the day. A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. Ground floors fall away towards the garden across the whole footprint, so the units are packed up long before anything is measured for stone. 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 dining room is a batch, and a batch is one slab run.

The workmanship guarantee is the same either way. It does not extend to a material we did not supply. How the slab has been stored is worth telling us, because stone kept flat is not stone off a rack. How much slab you hold matters: upstands and any remake have to come out of the same batch. Rear and side-return extensions are where the islands appear, and an island is the piece that decides whether one slab does the kitchen or two. Where an operator changes hands the bases usually stay, so a refit becomes a resurface and the saving comes from what is already bolted down. Ordered as a set, so the set matches.