Sizing by floor space or by habit gets it wrong. Size against the busiest ten minutes, and against who is really standing behind each counter.
Most venues size their bars and kitchens against an average: so many guests, so many counters, a ratio somebody worked out once and nobody has revisited since. The average is not what fails. What fails is a short stretch - a set change, a race finishing, gates opening - when a large share of the night's orders arrive together.
So the honest question is not how many stations the venue needs, but how many it needs during the busiest ten minutes it will have. Everything else will feel comfortable by comparison, and planning for the comfortable part is how a venue ends up with four counters open and one of them doing most of the work.
Venues almost always count higher than this list allows, which is why the busy stretch feels worse than the plan predicted. Do the count with the rota in front of you rather than the drawing.
A bar pouring from taps and a bar building three-part cocktails are not interchangeable, and neither is a kitchen that reheats and a kitchen that cooks to order. Work out, counter by counter, the item that takes longest and how often it gets ordered. That pairing, more than the headcount, decides how much a counter can absorb before orders start stacking up behind it.
Then look at where the menu sends the load. If the most popular item is sold at one counter only, that counter is the ceiling for the whole venue no matter how many others are open. Putting that item on a second counter is usually easier than building a station, and it is a change made in the menu rather than in the building.
Another counter means more stock, another machine, and at least one more person who knows the menu - and it spreads the staff you already have across a wider floor. Before adding one, try the three smaller moves: rebalance the menu so no single counter owns the busiest item alone, open an existing counter earlier so the surge does not meet a cold start, and make the quiet counters obvious to guests who currently walk straight past them.
If all three are done and the same counter still backs up every night, that is the station to add. Put it beside the pressure, selling the items that caused it, rather than at the far end of the site where there happened to be room.
Either way, the night itself will settle the argument. Count tickets per station against sales per station afterwards. The counter that took far more than its share is the one the next plan has to answer for, and that number is worth more than any ratio.