Night owls have flown the coop for good

It was a welcome return to the wonderful dining room at The Cinnamon Club in London’s Westminster, where my wife and I last dined many years ago when certain Indian restaurants were in the early days of breaking out of offering identikit menus and serving more regional cuisine.

We were back for some more of chef Vivek Singh’s excellent dishes, and to take advantage of the restaurant’s superb value early evening menu. At £38 for three courses, it is a great bargain because none of the dishes appear to be dumbed down/smaller versions of the regular menu, and it also comes with additional touches such as amuse bouche. 

This menu is available from 5.30pm to 6pm and would have previously been called a pre-theatre menu, but nowadays many places offer such deals to obviously attract more people at these earlier times. But is it really necessary today, because we are in the midst of a seismic shift in the way people eat out. It was prompted by covid-19, and has, if anything accelerated post-pandemic. Night owls are becoming a rare species.

We’ve had a deluge of statistics and data to highlight how the country now dines out earlier. The average preferred time for bookings at pubs, bars and restaurants is now 6.12pm, and as many as 48% of bookings in the first quarter of 2025 were for tables between 12pm and 6pm, according to research from CGA and Zonal. And it’s not just the old-timers who want to be comfortably tucked up at home earlier after a night out, because the survey found as many as 22% of 18 to 34-year-olds are now going out earlier than they were a year ago.

Will Beckett, co-founder of Hawksmoor, has said: “No one goes out late anymore. Before covid, a prime reservation slot was 7.30pm/8pm and a skilled restaurateur could turn tables in an evening. Now, the prime slot is 6pm/6.30pm, and very few people want to eat after 8pm.”

Hawksmoor does not have a discounted early evening menu, and why would it when you consider its trading patterns today? So why, are so many other restaurants offering cheaper early evening dining? In addition to bespoke early menus, there are apps out there being used by many restaurants offering discounts for the earlier hours.

Later timings are also being promoted, with The Cinnamon Club offering a 9pm-9.30pm two-course menu for a mere £25. Meanwhile, at Bob Bob Ricard, the 12pm to 6pm three-course £35 menu also comes into play again for 9pm bookings.

Renowned restaurateur Jeremy King has been particularly vocal about the dearth – or is it death – of late-night dining that was a mainstay of his earlier days running fashionable venues such as Le Caprice and The Wolseley. To pull in the night owls at his current places, The Park and Arlington restaurants, he has been offering diners booked from 9.15pm onwards (9pm on Sundays) 25% off their total bill. Are these late-night promotions worth the effort? 

Maybe the hospitality industry needs a total rethink about how it promotes booking times and devises its menus. It seems the time that needs promoting more nowadays is the former prime slots at 7.30pm/8pm, not the timings around 6pm. And should restaurants simply abandon any post-9pm business?

Against a backdrop of rising labour costs and customer behaviour having shifted to earlier dining hours, the focus of businesses should be more skewed to this early part of the evening, and the cut off time for final bookings should be much earlier. Bringing the resources forward to offer a full-on service in the early evening – and not having the team still setting up during this time – would be a sensible approach.

While earlier dining looked to be a short-lived phenomenon post-pandemic, the evidence increasingly suggests it is here to stay, and restaurants need to adapt to this new trading environment. Meanwhile, I’m going to try and enjoy as many early-evening menus as possible while they are still around.

Glynn Davis, editor, Retail Insider

This piece was originally published on Propel Info where Glynn Davis writes a regular Friday opinion piece. Retail Insider would like to thank Propel for allowing the reproduction of this column.