The Ultimate Guide to Every Restaurant Chair in Lahore - Part 2

More of my butt in more seats across Lahore. Featuring our first genuine 10/10 contender

Here’s Part 1 of this series if you missed it.

11. McDonald’s

Ah, McDonald’s. The classic no-nonsense, straight-to-the-point restaurant, and the seating embodies that philosophy.

This branch had plenty of seating options, and even some comfy-looking armchairs in the McCafe section. For this review, I chose to sit on the bench-like seats above.

This was a very strange experience. It’s a hard seat (although not wood, more like reinforced plastic), and it’s not cushioned. And yet, oddly enough, it was…okay..

There’s a curve to the base that keeps the underside of your thighs comfortable, and the table-to-chair height ratio is outstanding, because you can lean back or scoot forward with ease.

I spent about an hour on this seat without thinking about it too much, which is a compliment for any chair in my book.

My only gripe is the back of the seat curving down the sides, which means that if two people sit on it, only one shoulder will be supported, while the other will be in mid-air.

Score: 8/10

12. KFC

When I first saw this chair, I burst out laughing (I suppose only I can find humor in chairs).

Behold one of the worst restaurant chairs in Lahore. A masochist’s dream. Second only to Noon Bistro.

I can only assume that this was intended to be a stool, and the designer had the brilliant idea to give it some back support…except that adding this sorry excuse of a wedge makes it infinitely worse than if it was just a stool.

There’s no leaning back on this guy, unless you want a piece of metal cutting into your back.

And assuming you ignore the back support and just shift forward, your weight is off balance, the chair is squeaky, it moves around at disgusting angles, and the foot support (while again a nice thought) is directly under your legs, making it pointless because your legs are dangling straight down rather than at an angle.

The one saving grace of this chair is that it has a curved edge for your ‘knee pits’ - contrast this with the sharp edges of the bench at the back, and it makes it marginally more comfortable.

Score: 1.5/10

13. Ministry of Burgers

For the first few seconds of my experience with this chair, I thought I’d found another wooden gem.

The back of this chair is nicely curved, there’s that slight angle on the back support, and the cushion is pretty good. Solid all around for a wooden chair.

But that’s as far as I got before it all began to fall apart (literally).

This chair has the shakes.

You move forward, and the back legs stay in place while the front legs wobble under the momentum. You move backwards, and the back legs scrape the floor while the front legs refuse to budge.

Not. Good.

I thought the chair was broken, so I swapped it out and tested two more. Same problem.

My suspicions were confirmed when I flipped the chair over:

Flipping chairs over is perfectly normal restaurant behaviour

This is a structural integrity problem. Instead of the front legs being connected to the rear legs in parallel, they’re connected diagonally across from each other. And there’s no slats near the bottom to connect the feet of the chair. Hence the jankiness.

Oh, and the rest of the place has the three horsemen of bad seating that I refuse to even test: stools, benches, and sofa booths.

Overall a solid chair ruined by poor craftsmanship.

Score: 3.5/10

14. Nando’s

For a wooden chair, this one is surprisingly not uncomfortable.

Nice, wide base. Nice, wide back support. Sllight lean and a gentle curve.

For Nando’s, it’s actually a pretty great fit: for that 30-to-40-minute sweet spot, this chair ticks all the boxes.

It doesn’t have arm rests, but I think they can get away with it because of the great table-to-chair height ratio.

The only downside is that the sofa booth opposite this table was several inches lower than the chair - so my same-height friend was staring at my chin when sitting across from me.

Score: 7.5/10

15. Loafology

Loafology has some very interesting-looking seats. They certainly caught my attention as I walked in.

After about 30 minutes of sitting on one, I have to conclude that these are close to the best wooden chairs I’ve sat on in a restaurant.

Observe the ever-so-slight angle on the back support: that makes all the difference in terms of leanbackability. A minimum 5 degree tilt is all I ask for, and they happily oblige.

Then you’ll notice the subtle curve on the back rest: enough to cradle your shoulders without constricting them.

The base is a little unconventional:

I had my doubts about the duck-footed shape and the curve separating the legs, but surprisingly it was alright. Be warned that this is not going to be comfortable for larger folks though.

Judging by the L on the back, these seem to be custom-designed:

I think they’ve done a pretty good job.

My only complaint would be that the wood gets a little hard to comfortably sit on after a while, so a cushion would be ideal.

And the chair is about 2 inches too tall in relation to the table. You can see how my feet have to rest on the table support, and the table-to-mouth distance is too far for eating unless I really lean right over:

Score: 7.5/10, which is the best I can give a wooden chair.

But now comes the real star of the show.

As I was exiting, I saw this other chair outside that seemed too good to be true.

It’s not the prettiest.

But by God this is the best restaurant chair I’ve come across so far.

The back support is full and true: the perfect angle, and offers both upper and lower back support. Just look how my back is hugging the entire support - the way it should be:

The height is ideal, the base is perfect, and to top it off, there’s a gentle curve on the edge of base to accommodate the underside of your knees.

I measured the angle of the recline, and it’s a solid 110 degrees - the best you can ask for (short of a full reclining armchair).

I also measured the height and base: 41 centimeters each, in case you’re an aspiring chair designer and want to replicate this beauty.

Loafology really have hit it out of the park here.

🔥🔥🔥 Score: 9.5/10 🔥🔥🔥

- it’s a shame the chair is a bit of an eyesore

16. Eggspectation

Eggspectation had a variety of similar-looking chairs, each with a different pattern on the back, and each worse than the one before.

These backrests are pure wood - no padding means they’re exactly how you would expect them to be. And the various carving patterns mean your back will stick out in all manner of ways.

For my particular chair, the cushion was very hard. I didn’t imagine I would complain about my bum hurting on a cushioned chair, but here we are. Well done, chair.

Also to compliment the bad chairs, the tables were of mismatched heights for no reason:

There was no wobble in the tables and yet there was a one-inch gap between the heights. I could see this with other tables in the area as well.

Score: 3.5/10

17. Cosa Nostra

This chair does the impressive job of providing an awful all-around support system.

First, the back support. Three pieces of plastic aligned vertically. Not the best, but not the worst either, right?

Please zoom in.

The top rim protrudes out from the vertical slats. Which means your back never really touches the slats, it just awkwardly leans against the top rim, which of course is going to start cutting into your back quite quickly.

Then the cushion is flimsy enough that your butt can eventually feel the plastic base. Maybe it’s the excessive use, but those cushions need replacing.

And finally, the cushion is too large for the chair, meaning it goes off the edge of the base, meaning your lower thighs are just hanging in mid-air, in a ‘there’s a cushion underneath my legs but I can’t feel it because there’s nothing supporting the cushion’ way.

Score: 2.5/10

18. Tuscany Courtyard

This is peak “okay” chair. Unremarkable, not too good, not too bad.

The seat cushions here were adequately comfortable, albeit dirty.

The back support is typical of wooden chairs of this type: hard and uncomfortable. Although in this particular case, there was a slight give in the back rest, so it turned out to be a little more tolerable.

That being said, I took a look around and not a single person was using the back rest. That’s because the base is a little too long, so you have to either choose to sit on the edge of the seat to eat your food, or shuffle back to use the back support.

I tried doing both, and ended up awkwardly alternating between either slouching to support my lower back, or leaning to support my upper  back.

Not bad, not great.

Score: 6.5/10

19. Butt Karahi

For this review, I went to the gentrified Butt Karahi in DHA Phase 6 rather than the Lakshmi Chowk version. (Maybe I’ll do a special edition non-burger review series some time)

I was skeptical when I first sat on this chair. The back rest curves around you to provide you with very wide arm rests, which is somewhat awkward unless you want to pretend you’re sitting on  a throne with your elbows wider than your shoulders.

This is pretty much the only way to sit comfortably on this chair: you can’t dangle your arms to the side, and you can’t squeeze them against your body either.

And if you have to pull out your phone from your pocket, there’s going to be a lot of elbow-clashing against the chair. Almost as if you’re wearing a strait-jacket.

That being said, once the food was served and your arms were on the table (great arm-rest-to-table-height ratio), these problems melted away. I sat on this chair for two hours (the service was slow) and didn’t notice it at all. Shocking, really.

My main problem was that since it’s a wicker chair and I was wearing pajamas, my butt (pun unintended) kept sliding down the base when I leaned back.

Amongst the various seating options here, I did spot one other that was very comfortable:

The cushions were amazing for comfort and back support. But the table height and distance was awful, especially if you’re eating karahi.

Score: 7/10

20. PF Chang’s

This right here is a wicker chair done (almost) right.

This was in the rooftop section of the restaurant, so understandably it’s not the same as the regular chairs.

But this is a solid, sturdy wicker chair, with great back support, and a comfortable cushion.

Simple, efficient, and good.

Perhaps the arm rests are a little too high compared to the table height, but I found this to only be a visual problem - it was actually great for eating.

The table even has a foot rest, which, for my height, wasn’t ideal, but I could still make do with it as a bonus feature.

The only significant downside was the pattern of the arm rests:

This kept cutting into my forearms, making it impossible to rest them in one place comfortably for too long.

If the arm rests were padded, or at the very least flattened out, this would have been a solid 9/10 chair.

Score: 8/10

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If you missed it, here’s Part 1 of this series, which has some Very Important Research Notes in the footer.

Subscribe for more random stuff - next up is one last restaurant-themed post. And this time it isn’t going to be about the chairs. It’s about…cybersecurity, oddly enough.