2023 was a great year for restaurants across the country! More than 10,000 new restaurants opened nationwide between October 2022 and September 30th 2023, with New York City, Milwaukee and Las Vegas leading the way. This is about a 5.7% increase from the same time of the previous year. Employment levels are finally reaching pre-pandemic numbers again with over 12.37 million bar and restaurant workers, partially thanks to the surge of new restaurants opening.
New York City may have had more new restaurants than any other city (238), but New York state didn’t make it onto the top openings list at the state level. Florida was the state with the most new restaurants at 1,256 with Texas close behind at 1,056 and California with 930. With people beginning to travel again it makes perfect sense that cities and states with a robust tourism industry would see a boom in restaurant openings. Some food venues rely entirely on tourism so a return to travel has helped them to prosper again.
While 2022 saw a huge increase in spending for restaurants, 2023 saw those numbers taper off. 2022 continued the trend of rebuilding as the world ventured out again, while 2023 saw menu prices increase an average of 0.6% monthly due to the rising costs of inflation. Often dining out is the first luxury to be cut when consumers need to tighten their budget. However, overall spending in 2023 continued at a steady 5% growth, which fortunately still managed to outpace inflation.
Another trend of the past year became a greater focus on employees’ well being in the restaurant industry. To incentivize workers to join their teams more restaurants advertised paid time off, vacation time, and health care in their job listings. Since the pandemic many diners have also reported tipping more than they had previously out of sympathy for restaurant workers resulting from transparency of working conditions within the industry.
As the new year begins many industry websites are trying to pinpoint what they think will be the top restaurant trends of 2024. Some sites, such as BentoBox believe that many restaurants will continue to promote themselves as worker-friendly, and even use that as an incentive to attract diners! Another big contender in the coming year will be AI, whether it's used in marketing, inventory management, scheduling, or any number of helpful applications. In the post-pandemic landscape it’s clear that tech innovations are here to stay and will only continue to become more commonplace in helping restaurateurs run their businesses.
