Restaurant and cafe table tops in Stepney Green

Yes. Stepney Green is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are E1. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Tower Hamlets. With no scheme to work with there is nothing to book and nobody to ring, so the only levers left are an early arrival and a word with the neighbours. 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 quiet hour is worth more to us than a close bay. The measuring and the fitting are both done at the property, so there is nothing to visit or collect.

Walls are thick, lime-plastered and built in a soft brick, so they take a scribe well and take a fixing badly. 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 shopfront door is the only way in on most parades. 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. 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. Uneven flags outside are why outdoor feet adjust.

A balcony lift looks simpler than a window lift and is not, because the balustrade sets the height a piece has to clear before it can be lowered 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. Handling is where a polished edge gets damaged. Unrestricted kerbside is straightforward as long as the space in front of the property is actually clear when the van arrives. The bases are the heavy half of the delivery, so the pallet is dealt with first while there are still hands free for it. Nothing is left on a pavement while a space is found.

Not really, and claiming otherwise would cost nothing and mean nothing. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop design & quotation 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. 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. Orders are counted in pieces and never in metres. 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. Ordered as a set, so the set matches.

The two runs are read against each other rather than against the floor, so they are set to one datum taken across the aisle instead of measured up from the boards. 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. Mixed sizes are fine; unplanned mixed sizes are not. Supply-only material is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately rather than rolled in.

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. 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. The clearance under a fixed shelf is measured, not assumed. 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. Mixed ownership means the decision-maker is not always the person who lets us in, so it is worth being clear early about who signs the quote off. 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. A short term does not justify a surface that fails early.

The template is taken in your kitchen after the units are in and fixed, never before. The fitting itself is one visit: a plain run is a morning, an island with splashbacks takes most of the day. On the fitting day floors and door frames are protected, joins clamped flush, sink and hob sealed. A cast iron soil stack runs down the outside of the rear wall, so moving the sink means a fresh penetration through solid brick. 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.

Machining is permanent. If a later kitchen moves the sink, the grooves stay where they were cut. The alternative stands on the surface, so the choice is losing worktop permanently or only while you are draining. Grooves and an undermounted bowl are usually specified together, since the grooves are run to the bowl edge. Injected damp courses and re-rendered lower walls leave the bottom metre standing proud of everything above it. 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.

Small variation is taken up by packing under the top on the fitting day. A long top on units that were shimmed once and never checked is the commonest version of this, and it is cheap to fix beforehand. Levelling belongs in the carcasses, on their own legs and packers. A chimney breast left in place splits a wall into two alcoves, and the two are rarely the same width and rarely parallel to each other. Fixed seating sets the dimension it faces, so a piece against a bench is drawn to the bench instead of to a standard size. Room by room, since no two of them are the same.

Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. The sink, tap and hob have to be physically in the room at the template, not merely ordered, because the cut-out is machined to the item itself. A galley that is also the route to the back door is a corridor first and a kitchen second, and what the shape can take is set by the traffic going through it. 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. What a counter leaves behind is worth designing for.