A restaurant is the most popular place to hold a private party in Hoboken, Jersey City, Montclair or Manhattan, and for good reasons: the food is handled, the bar is handled, the room is already beautiful, and the host does not have to rent a single chair. It is also a room designed, down to the placement of every banquette, to keep people seated. Making a dining room dance is a specific skill, and it starts with understanding what the room was built for. This is what we do with restaurant buyouts and private rooms, from where the tables go to what the kitchen sounds like.
What a dance floor looks like in a dining room
Smaller than you picture, and that is fine. In a restaurant, the floor is whatever space opens up when a few tables are pushed back, typically a cleared area between the bar and the first row of tables, or the middle of a private room once the center tables are moved to the walls. Twelve feet by twelve feet is a good floor in a restaurant. Fifteen or twenty people dancing on it reads as a full floor, and a party of sixty rarely has more than that dancing at once anyway. A floor that is too big for the crowd looks empty; a small floor with twenty people on it looks like a party.
The question is when the tables move and who moves them. The answer is the servers, after dessert, and the moment to do it is during the toast, when everyone is looking at the speaker and nobody is looking at the staff quietly walking two-tops to the wall. We coordinate this with the manager during the planning call so that it does not happen during the first song on the floor, which is what happens when nobody has planned it. Chairs that have been moved should go somewhere people can still sit, because the guests in their seventies will want them, and a private room with the chairs stacked in a corner sends the wrong message to a third of the guest list.
Before the tables move, the room is a dinner. The music serves it at conversation level, set from the far table, and the restaurant's house system often does that job well. After the tables move, the room is a floor, and the house system is not going to do that job at all.
House sound, and why we bring our own for the floor
Restaurant sound systems are built to play background music evenly across a dining room, from small speakers in the ceiling, at a level where no table is louder than any other. They are good at that. They have almost no low end, they cannot get loud without distorting, and their volume is often controlled from a panel at the host stand or behind the bar rather than from anywhere near the DJ. Playing a dance floor through ceiling speakers produces a thin, loud, everywhere sound with no center, and people do not dance to it.
Our approach is to use both. During dinner we patch into the house system where the restaurant allows it, so the music is even across the whole room and we are not fighting the architecture. We carry the adapters, because the house input is frequently a small jack behind the bar or at the host stand rather than anything professional, and we find it during setup rather than at seven o'clock. For the floor, we bring a compact system: two speakers on stands and, where the room can take it, a small subwoofer, aimed at the cleared area only. The sound is focused where the dancing is, and the tables at the far end can still talk. The trade-offs between house sound and DJ sound apply to restaurants more sharply than to any other kind of room.
One working detail on the subwoofer. A sub on a restaurant floor rattles glassware on every table and every shelf behind the bar, and the manager will notice before the guests do. It stays off through dinner, comes in gradually once the floor opens, and never runs at the level it would in a hall. In a room with a tin ceiling or a lot of glass, we leave it in the van.
Kitchen noise, neighbors and the lease
The room is next to a kitchen, and a kitchen at nine o'clock is loud: the dish pit, the swinging door, the expediter. In a private room the door to the kitchen is usually the door the servers use, and it opens forty times an hour. During the toast this is a real problem, because the microphone is picking up the room and the room is picking up the kitchen. We ask the manager to hold the door during speeches, and we position the speaker giving the toast with their back to it, so the microphone faces away from the noise.
Neighbors are the other constraint, and in this part of the world they are usually upstairs. Restaurants in Hoboken, Jersey City and most of Manhattan sit under apartments, and many have volume conditions written into their leases or their local licensing that they take seriously because their business depends on it. When a manager says the music has to come down at a certain hour, that is not a suggestion, and it is not negotiable on the night. We ask during planning whether there is a volume limit or a cutoff, and we build the set to peak before it rather than to run into it. A party that peaks at 10:30 and softens at 11 feels complete. A party that is told to turn down at 11 in the middle of its best song feels cut off.
Load-in, footprint and power
Restaurants are set for the night by late afternoon. Tables are dressed, glassware is out, the floor is mopped. Carrying speaker stands through that at six thirty, during the manager's pre-shift meeting, is how a DJ becomes the vendor a restaurant does not book again. We arrange to load in before the room is set, usually mid-afternoon, and we come through whichever door the manager prefers, which is rarely the front one. Setup for a restaurant room takes less than it does in a hall, because the footprint is smaller: a four-foot table or a stand-mounted controller, two speakers, a sub if it is coming in, and cabling run along a wall where nobody walks.
Power in a private room is the thing to check. Most private rooms have one or two outlets, often behind a banquette, and one of them is running the room's point-of-sale terminal or a lamp. We carry enough cable to reach an outlet at the bar if the room's own outlets are spoken for, and we test whichever one we use before doors, because a restaurant circuit shared with a coffee machine behaves like a household one shared with a microwave. The space question is answered more fully elsewhere, but for a restaurant the honest answer is: a corner, an outlet, and a line of sight to the cleared floor.
A private room at a restaurant is also the most common venue for a milestone birthday or a retirement in this area, and both have their own posts. The corporate version of the same room, a company holiday party in a private dining room, is covered in its own post; this one is about the physical problem of the room, which is the same regardless of who is paying.
What to ask the restaurant before you book
- Whether tables can be moved after dinner, and who moves them.
- Whether a DJ can patch into the house system for dinner, and where the input is.
- Whether there is a volume limit or a cutoff time, and who enforces it.
- Whether the room shares a wall with the kitchen, and whether the kitchen door can be held during a toast.
- What time a vendor can load in, and through which door.
- Whether they need a certificate of insurance. Many now do, and we issue one at no charge.
The packages for a private party in a restaurant are the same three we use for every event, and they start at $2,500 for up to four hours. Lighting in a restaurant room is worth considering: small-venue lighting from $450 defines the floor in a space that otherwise looks like a dining room with the tables pushed back, and it is the single add-on that changes a restaurant party the most.
The date, the restaurant and roughly how many people. If you have the manager's name, add it; the planning call with the venue is where most of the above gets settled. Use the contact page or call (201) 705-3139. We reply within 24 hours.