Five O’Clock Dinner Crowd: Why Are Young Americans Eating So Early?

The girls’ trip was perfect: Samantha Stobo and her best friend spent two weeks in Italy drinking wine, suntanning, driving a convertible down the coast of Puglia. But there was one part of la dolce vita the 32-year-old never warmed up to: long, late, lazy dinners that rarely began before 8pm and stretched well past 10.

“I am such an early eater,” Stobo said. Back home in Miami, her “ideal dinner time” is 5.30; she simply “can’t wait” much later.

Stobo, who works in hotel marketing, does not care if that makes her sound uncool or uptight; she thinks a 5pm dinnertime is healthier. “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,” she said. An idyllic way to put it – but studies do show that eating two hours or less before bedtime can disrupt our circadian rhythm and be a risk factor for obesity.

Thought to be the stuff of early bird specials and old folks’ homes, the five o’clock dinnertime could be one of 2025’s most surprising comebacks, as younger generations seem willing to finish meals before the sun goes down. According to data collected by the reservation app OpenTable, 53% of gen Z and 51% of millennials in the US are interested in snagging an early seat. OpenTable also found that 5pm dining was up 11% from January to August 2025, compared with 2024; 6pm, the most popular time to eat, was up 8%, while 8pm was up only 4%. In New York – now, apparently, a sleepy city? – 5pm dining was up 20%.