Glossary

Seating chart (floor plan)

What is a restaurant seating chart?

The seating chart, or floor plan, is the map of every table in the room: numbers, seat counts, sections, and which tables combine. It is the host's chessboard. Before service, reservations are plotted onto it (the plot), matching party sizes to tables and spreading load across server sections; during service it tracks what is seated, dirty, or about to free up. Digital floor plans do this live and warn about conflicts, though reviewers note auto-plotting is not always accurate and hosts still override it. A chart also encodes house rules: which four-tops split into deuces, which section closes early, where the eight-top goes without blocking the runway to the kitchen.