Whenever 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.
The benefits here are clear: you get to socialise without staying up till all hours and being forced to skip your 972-step skincare routine; commuters don’t risk missing the last train; and eating a large meal after 8pm is generally considered to be worse for your health than dining earlier.
But what about the inevitable knock-on effects of this new trend? After all, you’re unlikely to be hungry at 6pm if you had lunch at 2pm. At this rate, we might have to start setting our alarms for the middle of the night and having breakfast then, in order to squeeze in all our meals. But if that’s what it takes to keep up with gen Z, who am I to argue?