The surprising toddler-inspired dining trend sweeping Sydney restaurants – MASHAHER

The latest dining trend to grip Sydney isn’t driven by food or design. Instead, we’re in the midst of a phenomenon of eating early. Very early. “By 9.30pm restaurants are done,” says Maurice Terzini, the veteran restaurateur with a stable of Sydney venues that stretches from city to surf.

Terzini’s view is echoed by restaurateurs across Sydney. Diners are edging in on the traditional time and turf of families with kids and high chairs. At an hour when many European countries are accepting their first bookings, our stragglers are fetching the bill.

On a typical night last week, the hot new King Clarence restaurant in the Sydney CBD – part of a stable that includes the hatted Bentley and Monopole – had more than 60 per cent of its bookings in the slot between 5pm and 6pm.

“Everyone goes to bed earlier,” says King Clarence co-owner Nick Hildebrandt, pointing to the snoozing and streaming cultural shift kick-started by COVID lockdowns. Hildebrandt cites the example of Bentley’s early days, when its later 8.30pm start was always the more popular, and full. “Everyone’s in early tonight,” he says.

The anecdotal shift is backed up by data from restaurant booking platforms. “Based on the millions of reservations booked at SevenRooms … over the last six months, 6pm is the most popular time for dining out,” a SevenRooms spokesperson said. Likewise, OpenTable analysed data from as early as last year that showed Australians are eating earlier, with 6pm our favourite timeslot and 5pm offering the largest year-on-year growth.

“During COVID everyone was eating early and going to bed early, and that’s become a habit,” says Attila Yilmaz, the owner-chef at Pazar Food Collective in Canterbury, who has also watched booking times skew earlier. “We have a generation of diners who [became adults] during COVID, are they staying at home having UberEats parties?”

Terzini, who observes a wide Sydney demographic with venues such as Jacksons on George in the CBD and his glam Bondi restaurant Icebergs Dining Room and Bar, believes Sydney’s lockout laws rolling into COVID lockdown shaped our new early-bird culture. And he argues we can throw in the fact that “Sydney doesn’t have a lot of late-night places to kick on to”.

Yilmaz agrees with Terzini. “I think it’s sad we’re going backwards instead of embracing the Euro style of dining later. In Turkey, no one goes out until 9pm, and it doesn’t have to be drinking after dinner, you might go to a great patisserie. Sydney has the perfect climate for [that lifestyle].”

Nigel Ward, the owner of Passeggiatain Waverley, also subscribes to the theory COVID changed our dining habits, eating earlier at home during the pandemic and learning to make our own cocktails. He also believes the shift from traditional three-course dining to more shared plates has consumers finishing their meals faster and exiting restaurants earlier.

It could also be that the industry itself has encouraged this trend, by having two or three sittings each evening during the boom years, and training diners to eat earlier because many customers don’t want the late 8.30pm slot.

“Even the fact King Clarence is open at 5pm, no one opened that early five years ago,” Hildebrandt says of Sydney’s new dining landscape. And he isn’t entirely unhappy with the early-bird shift. “From a business perspective it’s fine,” he says, pointing to lower operational costs from closing earlier.