A recent article in The New York Times claimed Spaniards are no longer eating out as late as they famously do. The Local’s reporter and travel writer Esme Fox sets out to unearth if there’s any truth to this.
This week, The New York Times ran an article titled ‘The 10 p.m. Dinner is a Spanish Tradition. Are people giving it up?’, in which London-based reporter Jonathan Wolfe talked about how many Spaniards are supposedly leaving behind the custom of late-night dining and eating much earlier than before.
Spain is of course known throughout the world for its late-night culture, which starts with people having dinner at 9pm or 10pm, dragging out their meals and drinks in bars and restaurants until midnight, before heading out to nightclubs, many of which open at around 2am.
In countries like the UK for example, restaurants begin to close around 10pm and nightclubs shut their doors at 2am.
I remember explaining to my British in-laws (who have a strict dinner time of 6pm) that nowhere would be open in Barcelona at that time and that they’d have to wait until at least 8pm. Even then, we’d probably be one of the only few groups in the restaurant.
Is this ingrained Spanish tradition really changing though? Are Spaniards eating earlier?
READ ALSO: Why do Spaniards eat so late?
According to the New York Times article, which analysed data from millions of diners on table booking site Cover Manager, tables reserved for 10pm in Spain only accounted for 15 percent of dinner reservations last year.
Back in 2016, the number of 10pm dinner reservations was 30 percent.
Tables booked for 11pm accounted for just 1.9 percent now, compared to 5.7 percent in 2016.
This definitely shows that a shift has likely taken place within the last decade and late-night dining times have significantly decreased.
An article on Spanish property portal Idealista also noted something similar, stating “Increasingly, many families are sitting down to dinner around 9pm. It’s still later than the European average, but this gap is gradually narrowing.”
I have now worked on several editions of the Lonely Planet guidebooks to both Barcelona and Spain in general.
During my most recent research period for the Barcelona guide this past spring, I noticed that many of the city’s bars and restaurants indeed had earlier closing times.
While a few years ago, many of them stayed open until after midnight, this year I saw a significant change in the opening hours with many places not even open until midnight at all.
READ ALSO – Debunking the myth: How true are Spanish stereotypes?
People are now booking dinner reservations more for 9pm rather than 10pm. Photo: JAIME REINA / AFP
And this isn’t in small towns in the countryside, this is in Spain’s second-largest city, famed for its nightlife. The question is, are places closing earlier because people are choosing to eat earlier, or are people forced to eat earlier because the establishments are closing earlier?
One thing I have noticed, however, is that dining times do tend to shift depending on where you are in the country.
A few years ago, I worked on the Lonely Planet Pocket Guide to Bilbao and San Sebastián in the Basque Country, and I remember noticing that everyone ate slightly earlier there than in Barcelona and that restaurants closed earlier too.
Then, when I worked on the editions of the Andalusia guide, I noted that dining times were much later than both in the Basque and in Catalonia.
While researching for the guide, I found myself regularly going out for dinner until 11pm or even midnight most evenings. Having lived in Granada for a while too, I found this the norm.
One of the main explanations for this could be to do with the climate. Essentially, the hotter it is as you travel south, the later people tend to eat.
It makes sense that people wait until it gets cool enough to cook eat dinner.
READ ALSO: Spain’s Labour Minister calls time on ‘mad’ late-night dining
Back in 2024, Spanish Labour Minister Yolanda Díaz claimed that restaurants staying open beyond midnight in Spain is “madness”.
“It is not reasonable for a country to have its restaurants open until one in the morning,” she said.
“We can’t expect to keep extending working hours until we don’t know what time,” she added, citing the differences with other European countries.
At the time, she angered many in the hospitality industry who were proud of their late-night dining culture, but many also agreed with her points or had even noted a change themselves.
Eduardo Basanta, executive director of La Musa, a gastronomic group with eight bars and restaurants in Madrid at the time said: “We are considering closing a little earlier, but not because the minister said so. Customs are changing, and Spaniards are going out for dinner earlier and not staying out for drinks as long.”
Even two years ago, people in the industry had been noticing a shift, so this is not anything new. It seems that Spaniards have been slowly moving their dining times earlier for a while now. It’s even happening in the Madrid, often nicknamed ‘the city that never sleeps’.
Back in 2024, Madrid’s regional president Isabel Díaz Ayuso – whose most famous political slogan is ‘communism or freedom’ – said she wanted bars and restaurants in the Spanish capital to open earlier for lunch and dinner to cater to foreign tourists and their eating habits.
So it could well be that these apparent earlier eating habits and restaurant closing times are being also influenced by Spain’s ever-growing tourist population, expected to hit 100 million this year.
You may be wondering how it is that eating so late become so entrenched in Spanish habits.
There are a couple of theories and explanations – the main one being that Spain has been in the wrong time zone for more than 80 years.
Fascist dictator Francisco Franco reportedly wanted to show his support for Hitler by putting the clocks forward by an hour to be in line with the time in Nazi Germany.
According to experts, this has had a lasting impact on Spanish culture and society as it’s affected Spaniards’ productivity, sleep cycles (with it in part the need for siestas) and of course meal times.
“If we don’t change to GMT we lengthen the day, eat very late and then don’t sleep,” Nuria Chinchilla, professor at Spain’s IESE business school said about the need to “return to the natural order of our circadian rhythm (our 24-hour physiological cycle) that goes with the sun… and the sun in Greenwich, not Germany”.
Another theory is that during the post-Civil War years, many were very poor and were forced to work more than one job to make ends meet. Because of this, they simply didn’t have time to have dinner any earlier and had to eat when they finished their second job, which ended very late.
The third theory of course is the climate in Spain, mentioned above. In other words, it’s simply too hot still around 6pm or 7pm to feel like eating a meal, particularly in summer, and almost unthinkable in many places to start turning on the oven or the stove, until the air has cooled down.
Whatever the reason, it looks like dining habits are changing and Spaniards are beginning to eat earlier, through a combination of globalisation, touristification, changing social habits and calls for better rights for hospitality workers.
While my in-laws still won’t be happy that the meal here hasn’t shifted to 6pm, it looks like many Spaniards may now be meeting them somewhere in the middle and are accepting dinner times of 8:30pm or 9pm instead of 10pm or later.