A Message for Restaurants with Booths

Please stop attaching your tables to the wall.

See those booths in the back? A fat person’s nightmare. At least this restaurant has other options available. Many don’t. Photo by Benjamin Canizales on Flickr.

While traveling recently, my mom and I stopped for a late lunch/early supper at a restaurant we chose because its unusual name had caught our attention when we drove by earlier in the day. I want to complain a bit about some of its seating arrangements as part of a larger problem, but I’m not going to name the restaurant because the food was delicious and the service excellent.

This particular restaurant had a variety of seating options: regular tables, bar seating, tall tables, booths elevated on little platforms in the bar area, and booths flat on the floor in the dining area. At first, we intended to sit in one of the booths in the bar area, but we quickly realized that wasn’t going to work: I may have lost more than 100 pounds last year, but I’m still quite a bit larger than the average person, and the booths’ tables were affixed to the wall — a well-known nightmare for any fat person. We sat down, and I technically fit, but it would have meant spending an uncomfortable meal with the table pressing into my ribcage, so we gave up and went to a table in the dining area instead.

Here’s the thing: yes, this restaurant had several seating options, for which I was grateful, but many don’t — or, at least, they don’t have enough.