Full-Service Restaurants: The Busiest Hours, Reservation Insights, and Popular Proteins by State

The Q3 2023 Restaurant Trends report dives into full-service restaurants, guest reservation booking and dining behavior from Toast Tables, protein trends by state, and some good news regarding tipping.

By Toast

BOSTON, MA – Toast (NYSE: TOST), the all-in-one digital platform built for restaurants, today announced its Q3 2023 Restaurant Trends Report, providing insight into the overall state of the U.S. restaurant industry through an analysis of aggregated data from selected cohorts of restaurants and in select U.S. metropolitan areas on the Toast platform, which serves approximately 99,000 restaurant locations as of September 30, 2023. Read more details about our methodology below.

The hourly heatmap: the busiest hours for transactions at full-service restaurants

This report will look into dinner service transaction data from full-service restaurants on the Toast platform and reservation data from Toast Tables. First, let’s look at transaction data.

To better understand dining behavior and the current state of dinner service at full-service restaurants (FSRs), Toast analyzed transaction counts on the Toast platform in 17 metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) in the U.S. between 4 p.m. and 12 a.m. local time in Q3 2023.1 These transactions occur when guests have paid for their service, not when they initially sat to eat. 

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