10 Restaurant Interior Designs Setting the Trend

A restaurant interior is a business plan rendered in materials. The room decides what a first-time guest expects to pay before the menu arrives, how long a table lingers, whether the bar earns a second visit, and what ends up photographed and shared. That is why restaurant interior design has moved from decoration to strategy—and why the strongest operators now brief their designers on covers, check averages, and turn times before anyone talks about finishes.

HH Designers is a national restaurant interior design firm headquartered in Toms River, New Jersey, with work in 21 states, more than 60 million square feet of commercial space designed, and $2B in documentation behind it. Our hospitality portfolio runs from destination steakhouses to two-thousand-square-foot gelaterias, and much of it is concentrated along the Jersey Shore—a market where a dining room has to win a beach crowd in July and a date-night crowd in January with the same four walls.

The ten projects below are real HH Designers rooms, not mood boards. They cover the full spread of service models—fine dining, casual Italian, fast casual, self-serve, counter service, and bakery café—and every one of them ties a visible design move to an operational outcome: a queue that flows, a display case that sells, a private room that books out the calendar. We start in Pier Village in Long Branch, work down the shore to Toms River, and finish in Lakewood. For the underlying playbook, see our restaurant interior design guide and our notes on how design drives restaurant revenue.

1. SALT Steakhouse — the destination dining room

SALT is 10,000 square feet of proof that the Jersey Shore can carry a true upscale steakhouse. Restaurateur David Mizrahi opened it in Pier Village in 2021 with a dual-audience problem: by day the boardwalk belongs to beach-goers in sandals, by night SALT serves a fine-dining crowd at fine-dining expectations. The room answers with drama that stays composed—halo pendants orbiting against a blacked-out ceiling, fluted copper-toned columns, and a bold geometric tile floor that grounds the energy at the bar.

At the tables, the register shifts: channel-tufted banquettes, velvet club chairs, and marble tops pull the volume down to conversation level, while a glass-walled meat display turns the program itself into theater. A glass-enclosed private dining room—one dark-timber table under a constellation of pendants against a marble-and-brass wall—gives the kosher celebration calendar a stage and books revenue that the main floor alone could not. The lounge that followed in 2022 added a second gear between dinner seatings. Every move earns covers.

2. Pēpe Kitchen — the casual counterpoint two doors down

After SALT redefined upscale kosher dining at the Shore, the same family asked for its opposite number two doors away. Pēpe Kitchen, opened in 2024, is a casual Italian eatery where the beach crowd can walk in wet-haired for Neapolitan pizza—Cholov Yisroel and Pas Yisroel certified, with a kids’ menu and outdoor seating. The brief was a completely different temperature at the same standard.

The room reads like a European corner café dropped a block from the Atlantic: French bistro chairs in a navy-and-white weave, pale oak tables, brass dome pendants hung low over the pizza counter, and a red neon PIZZA sign burning against perforated-steel screens. The open counter stacks takeout boxes in view—a deliberate cue that a slice to go is as welcome as a sit-down meal. Where SALT goes black marble, Pēpe goes daylight and rattan. Two rooms, one operator, and no confusion about which door you are walking into—that is portfolio strategy done in finishes.

3. LBK — boardwalk color theory

LBK is 5,000 square feet of Long Branch designed for families who just came off the sand and want the room to keep the holiday going. The exposed ceiling is painted a saturated turquoise, oversized orange dome pendants drop into the seating zones, and a wall-to-wall collage mural of vintage beach imagery gives every table something to look at and—more valuably—something to post.

The layout move is the partition system: chain-hung screens and low millwork dividers break the open floor into lounge-scaled pockets, so a big, loud, kid-friendly room still offers each party a sense of its own territory. Seating mixes coral sofas, denim-blue sectionals, and rattan-framed chairs—residential silhouettes in contract-grade materials that shrug off sunscreen and sand. The operational win is dwell time on the shoulder hours: a room this comfortable holds the late-afternoon crowd until dinner, and its color story does the marketing every time a phone comes out.

4. Cafe — self-serve engineered for throughput

This 2,500-square-foot Long Branch cafe shows how much a small footprint can produce when the plan is honest about its service model. The program is self-serve, so the design puts the machines on stage: a full millwork wall holds the dispensers in a clean grid, flanked by open shelving of canisters and greenery, with a plain instruction—walk the wall, build your order, move on.

The long counter is clad in marble with glass guards, elevating a format that usually reads as fast food into something closer to a patisserie. Warm blush walls, timber orb pendants, and a herringbone floor keep the space photogenic; floor-to-ceiling storefront glazing turns the whole room into a sign at night. The layout is a single loop—enter, serve, pay, sit—so peak summer traffic never doubles back on itself. Small room, high turns, no pinch points: that is the whole business case, drawn in plan.

5. Pizza Long Branch — the oven wall as stage set

In a 3,000-square-foot slice shop, the ovens are the brand—so we built the room around them. Twin stainless deck ovens sit in arched, backlit niches like objects in a gallery, framed by a graphic black-and-white splatter tile wall that reads from across the street. Red dome pendants punctuate the service line, and the counter itself pairs a warm wood-slat front with a black stone top where the pans line up in full view.

The plan is built for volume: the ordering queue runs parallel to the counter, so customers watch pies come out of the arches while they wait—the best appetite marketing there is—and pickup peels off at the far end without crossing the line. Dark ceiling, focused light on the food, durable tile everywhere hands touch. It is a lesson in counter-service design: spend the budget where every customer looks, and let the theater of the ovens do the selling.

6. La Mossa Pizzeria — Roman trattoria bones in Toms River

La Mossa is a 2,000-square-foot pizzeria romana in our home town of Toms River, and it proves that a tight room can carry a fully realized identity. The material story is old-world without costume: exposed red brick, black steel-framed windows and French doors, a grey-and-white checkerboard stone floor, and arched brick niches holding black-and-white photography of Roman streets. A single lantern sconce and a brass dimensional logo do the branding; nothing shouts.

The seating plan works the geometry hard—camel leather booths hold the perimeter where parties settle in, while black café chairs at stone-topped tables fill the center and flex for lunch traffic. The exposed black ceiling adds height and hides the mechanical reality of a pizza kitchen without drywall cost. For an independent operator, this is the template: pick five materials with genuine texture, detail them honestly, and the room will feel like it has been there for decades—in the best way.

7. Miele Gelato — a palette you can taste

Miele Gelato is 2,000 square feet of Toms River designed around a single truth of the dessert business: the case is the hero, and everything else is lighting and backdrop. The serving counter runs the width of the room, its marble-look front and white top framing the gelato tubs like jewelry. Behind it, a mint-green stacked-tile wall carries brass script signage—Gelateria on one side, the Miele mark centered—with slim brass shelves displaying cones and packaging.

The palette is edible by design: pistachio tile, cream millwork, honey-toned timber café chairs, and wood-orb pendants overhead that cast a warm, appetizing light. Seating is intentionally light—a few small tables—because the model is queue, serve, stroll. The counter geometry lets the line drift sideways along the full case, which lengthens browsing and lifts the average order. Sweet shops live and die on impulse; this room is engineered to encourage it, gently.

8. Very Juice — biophilic fast casual

Very Juice took a 4,000-square-foot Toms River space and turned the health-food promise into architecture. The service core is a curved, timber-slat drum at the center of the plan—customers orbit it rather than queue against a wall, which keeps the room legible even at rush. A full-height tree anchors the space, rattan pendants and cafe string lights layer the ceiling, and chairs upholstered in a botanical leaf print carry the brand onto every seat.

Planted sills and greenery at the windows do double duty: they soften the storefront and screen diners from the parking lot without blocking daylight. Materials stay in the natural register—wood slat, terrazzo-look flooring, brass frames—so the space photographs like a garden café rather than a smoothie chain. That matters commercially: a juice bar sells wellness, and a room that visibly practices what the menu preaches converts first-time walk-ins into regulars. The curved counter is the move worth stealing.

9. Avocado — the branded counterline

Avocado is a 5,000-square-foot fast-casual operation in Lakewood, completed in 2022, and its design lesson is discipline: one joke, told perfectly. The marquee-bulb AVOCADO sign in green and gold owns the back wall, and the entire room supports it—green picket-tile counter fronts with white stone tops, a wood-slat backdrop trimmed with greenery, and warm sconces that keep the palette ripe rather than loud.

The counterline itself is the operational engine. Pastry and hot cases, refrigerated grab-and-go, and the register run in one continuous, legible sequence, so a customer reads the full offer while moving toward the point of sale—no doubling back, no decision paralysis at the front of the line. Subway tile and stainless below the cases take the daily abuse; the brand moments sit above hand height where they stay pristine. For multi-daypart operators serving breakfast through dinner, this is the model: let the food display do the menu’s work and design the queue like a conveyor.

10. Ryes Bakery — calm, craft, and a focal point nobody forgets

Ryes Bakery, 6,000 square feet in Lakewood completed in 2019, shows the quiet end of the spectrum: a bakery designed to read as craft, not production. Blonde wood paneling wraps the room, counters are clad in soft grey marble, and open racks display baguettes and pastries at eye level where they sell themselves. Black dome pendants and a near-monochrome palette keep the focus on the bread.

Then there is the move nobody forgets: a long aquarium built flush into the millwork wall above the coffee station, glowing green against all that pale timber. It gives children something to watch while parents order, gives the room a signature, and costs far less than the goodwill it generates. Functionally, the plan separates the morning coffee rush from the bakery counter so the two lines never collide—the kind of front-of-house flow discipline we detail in our guide to kitchen and front-of-house flow.

What these ten rooms have in common

Different check averages, one discipline. Every project above starts with the service model—fine dining, counter service, self-serve—and lets that dictate the plan before any finish is chosen. Every one puts the budget where guests actually look: the oven wall, the display case, the ceiling over the bar. And every one is documented to construction level in a complete Spec Book, so the room that opens is the room that was designed.

If you are planning a new restaurant or a renovation, start with our restaurant design cost guide, look at how we run projects on our process page, or go straight to a proposal request. We design restaurants nationally from our New Jersey studio—including bars and lounges, coffee shops, and everything on the spectrum between SALT and a slice shop.