Comfort and food are meant to be together!

I work for a company that has recently opened a new restaurant. It is high-end sushi. It is a beautiful space, built to awe guests, and to offer the best. In the lounge, they went with low, round tables, with swivel lounge chairs. They look fantastic. The chairs in their own right are very comfortable, but try sitting in them and eating off the table and they all of a sudden seem so wrong! The table hits just below knee height for most, and so eating requires leaning forward to reach the food. Or, as I did, bringing the plate onto your lap. Needless to say it is very uncomfortable! It definitely took away from my dining experience. It makes me think that not one person considered how it would feel to eat at these tables. This blows me away because the restaurant was designed by a respected designer in Winnipeg. In terms of all of the emphasis we are receiving on the body, and its connection to our designs, I can't figure out what goes wrong in these types of situations. Is it that you can just get lost in the aesthetic aspect of the design? Do they not care? Do they not know? It scares me to think about inadvertently overlooking details like this in my design career. It disappoints me that there are designers who don't care! One of the things that I am learning very quickly is how much the built environment really affects people. And still, something seemingly so simple is over-looked by an experienced designer. In the book Townscape(yes the one we all paid $40 for and never used!)Gordon Cullen said "The speed of change prevents the environment organizers from settling down and learning by experience how to humanize the raw material thrown at them. In consequence the environment is ill-digested." In a design gone wrong, people seem to have gotten lost in the business of it all, working within budgets etc.. Also, I think specifically in this case, everything was designed, and then the tables added in. It seems that a customer's comfort would be second only to the quality of what is served. In that case, it may have been wise to create an enjoyable space to dine, and DESIGN around that. After all, you can awe people all you like, but the experience, and how they FEEL is what they will remember most.