Drinking booze at restaurants

Last week, The New York Times published an article about how restaurant-goers are drinking less alcohol, which is affecting restaurants' bottom lines and, in some cases, causing them to close.

We chatted about this phenomenon and how and whether it tracks with our own dining habits and how they've changed over time. A transcript of that conversation was included in our Studio Pass exclusive newsletter This Week At ChefSteps, but the gist of it can be summed up in Nick's comment:

"We’re not ready to change our eating habits, and we still want to tip our servers, so the only thing left is our drinking habits. You know, something’s got to change."

Have you found yourself drinking less alcohol at restaurants of late? Has it been in response to rising prices? Or has the change been inspired by something else, such as health concerns or new research/scientific consensus about the effects of alcohol?

For restaurants, what's the solution? The cookie-cutter formula for restaurant success has been, as the article recounts, 60% of revenue comes from alcohol and 40% from food. Do you think this model is antiquated? Or is this current moment just a brief blip?

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Comments

omgitsjulian

I watched an interesting video about this actually:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Czya3nyudpU

TL;DW: Billy Eilish, Spider Man, Youtube, Pot, The Economy, and no cool drinking movies like The Hangover are to blame.

montebello1964

I'm old enough to think that a bottle of wine is an essential part of the fine dining experience. But in this era, when it is easy for anyone to look up the price of literally anything on their smartphone while they are sitting at the table, the commonplace 200-300% wine markups over retail (let alone wholesale) are inevitably going to feel less and less palatable or sustainable.

Combined with an apparent decrease in alcohol consumption in general, the writing is sadly on the wall. At least with food, we can imagine that a dish that most people can't easily replicate at home has 15 ingredients and took two days to prepare (even if it didn't). No one actually believes wine service represents what it actually costs to offer, particularly at restaurants where the wine list is an afterthought or is trying to upsell you on bad wines with cool sounding stories presented by kids who won't be in the business 3 years from now.

Personally, this drives me towards BYOB restaurants or the least expensive palatable bottle on the list. I'm a little more generous when it comes to cocktails, if they show some real creativity.