Early evening restaurant bookings are on the rise. Great for commuters and sleep purists, but what about the rest of us?
W
henever I arrange dinner with one particular friend, we haggle. The date and venue are easy to sort out, but when it comes to what time we should convene, it’s always a lengthy negotiation. I make snide “jokes” about Grandma’s Earlybird Special, she reminds me we do not live in Spain, and slowly we meet in the middle, where neither of us is happy. Now it turns out that by wanting to have dinner at 6pm, she is extremely fashionable.
Curses!
It’s all down to pesky gen Z, of course. Not content with slating our no-show socks and banning the French tuck, they’re now making early evenings the new late nights when it comes to dining. According to the Times, online restaurant reservation service OpenTable reports a steep rise in 6pm bookings, up 11% in London and 6% across the UK compared with the same period last year. And Zonal, the hospitality tech service, reveals the new national average dining time is 6.12pm. Joe Laker, the savvy chef and co-founder of Counter 71 in Shoreditch, London, has introduced a £50 early evening set menu as a result, and will surely not be the last to do so.
