These young Americans are reshaping the American dining landscape. In one respect, they’re swinging the pendulum all the way in the other direction — to earlier dinner times. New figures released by OpenTable indicate that restaurant meals taken at 5 PM have increased 20 percent in 2025. From January to August, the popularity of this dining time experienced a remarkable 11% boost over the prior year. This trend is particularly pronounced with Gen Z and millennials. In reality, 53% of Gen Z and 51% of millennials prefer to take a seat at this earlier time.
Giovanni Luciano, a 24-year-old line cook at a swank Brooklyn bistro, embodies this emerging dining zeitgeist. He goes to dinner maybe at five o’clock sometimes. This is not his decision, perhaps an illusion—it’s only that he believes himself to be an heir to a court meal schedule that predates the rush. After his night shift, he’s usually hungry enough for a second dinner. Luciano expresses mixed feelings about this early dining schedule, stating, “I like a candle with my dinner, baby. I want it to be dark.”
Samantha Stobo, another early dinner disciple, lawmaker and advocate, thinks having dinner at 5 PM makes people healthier. When she recently posted her dinnertime preference on TikTok, over 61,000 were interested and liked her short clip about it. Stobo’s ideal dinner time is even slightly later at 5:30 PM. She reflects on the natural rhythms of life, saying, “That’s the normal time people used to eat dinner when we, like, lived by the sun and the moon and the way of the world.”
Chris Syed, the managing partner of New York’s Highwater Rooftop, has experienced this as well, having witnessed a large uptick in younger customers. They show up at his joint exactly at 5 o’clock. He wishes that the early dinner crowd was a little more like the late-night, post-bar crowd. There’s a huge difference between the 8 o’clock crowd and the five o’clock crowd,” he says. He is also the first to point out the dangerous trend this creates for restaurant profitability. He continues, financial pinch and costs are dictating the pressures to these sit down establishments, “I can’t serve 200 people at the happy hour price.
OpenTable’s recent State of Dining report found that 6 PM is still peak dining time. It has gone up only 8% this year. In remarkable opposition, eating out at 8 PM has increased by only 4%. This move towards dining earlier is part of a wider trend in lifestyle and working from home since Covid. Julia C Skinner, a food writer and historian, suggests that these earlier mealtimes reflect America’s evolving relationship with work-from-home culture. Dinner, she says, is a great example of how our cultural norms and rituals aren’t inevitable.
The early dinner trend points to a different kind of social change. A majority of young diners are flocking to happy hour deals, turning dining into an affordable option. Syed explains how this makes it possible for them to eat a much less expensive meal. All they have to do is agree to a short ride from five to seven PM.
As these trends continue to grow restaurants are being put in a tough position. We will be watching closely to see how they transform to serve their customers evolving tastes. Cheryl Paniagua from OpenTable points to a promising trend. So far this year, diners have been booking dinner reservations sooner, perhaps as a result of dynamics like going back to the office, shifting health and wellness priorities, and the tactic of booking harder-to-get tables during off-peak times.
Luciano’s attitude towards dining early is not unique, it’s actually indicative of views common across his peers. For Hoang, speeding up dining services can take away from the experience he says people come for. Brett Spitzberg tastes that too. “Early eating eats up dinner when you rush it through,” he says.