Café Ethnography : the uses of tables and chairs

Café Ethnography:
place. They joked that whoever put the table in their place should expect "trouble".
The fact that such a matter could be raised at all is the indication of the lease-like
entitlements that regular customers acquire to certain seating positions within a café,
even though they are apparently only passing through for a cup of coffee or a
sandwich like every other customer. And once again an indication of the way in
which the seat reserving rule might run against the entitlements to seating of
regulars. 16
For customers who wish to remain solitary during potentially busy periods in the café,
the two smaller 2-seater tables could be chosen in preference to the larger 4-seater
tables since table-sharing was less easy to accomplish at the 2-seater tables. At a 2seater,
a pair of unacquainted customers would sit directly opposite one another, and
managing to avoid catching one another's gaze whilst dining required greater skill. By
contrast with the 2-seater arrangement a single person occupying a 4-seater at a busy
period was thereby opening themselves to the possibility of having to share. (This was
the situation that lead to the 'wedding photo' encounter described below.) As (Wieder
1974) notes in his ethnography of a halfway house, seating patterns at the six seater
tables in their dining room could result in a resident 'getting stuck' when surrounded
by five members of staff (pp78-79). In the halfway house where resident's
maintenance of distance from staff was part of their code of conduct then this would
lead to 'stuck' resident getting up and moving to another table. At the Flaming Cup a
'stuck' diner might also move their seating position but was even more likely to be
encouraged into making small talk with the other café diners. As a common
occurrence table sharing was, then, one of the ways in which the (passing) customers
of the Flaming Cup were 'doing informality.'
16 It is still common in many village British and Irish pubs for 'regulars' to have their own seat and for
newcomers to the pub to make the mistake of sitting in a regular's seat and later finding themselves the
subject of mockery when the regular arrives and demands their seat back, while the other regular's look
on and possibly laugh at the newcomer for their 'mistake'.
14