A plate of pasta before you, a lover, and a 9 p.m. sunset. What feels more romantic than a late summer evening meal al fresco? Well, it’s certainly not the 3 a.m. indigestion that follows.
Turns out, late dinners are no longer du jour —a recent study by online restaurant reservation platform OpenTable reported a significant uptick in 6 p.m. bookings—in London, it’s up 11%. Dining as early as 5 p.m. is also up 10%. Another 2024 study showed it was Gen Z who was leading these twilight dinner times. Hospitality tech service Zonal also found that the average dining time is 6:12 p.m., driven by younger consumers. Data gleaned from Yelp in 2024 also reflected that younger generations across the U.S. are becoming earlybird diners too.
While reasons for these earlier dinner times span ev