Why Are So Many Restaurants Now Opening For Lunch?

Almost a year beyond the return of the power lunch, lunch — period — is back, with multiple restaurants that are often booked for dinner rolling out the midday meal within the past few weeks. And it’s not just places near offices in Midtown: It’s all around the city, from hotels to off-the-beaten-path neighborhood spots.

The lunch momentum has been building, with reservations up nearly 20 percent from the year prior, according to Debby Soo, CEO of OpenTable, in part due to a return to the office. It makes sense to roll out a new service, with profit margins dropping nearly 10 percent last year, and debt a looming concern, according to a yearlong study on NYC dining from Touch Bistro, a restaurant software company. Still, daytime can be a risk — and banks on white-collar workers who have leisure time (and money) for longer meals in the middle of the day.

Roscioli — the Soho hotspot where writer Jay McInerney almost ignored a doctor’s call to go to the ER because he didn’t want to leave his table — just started a three-course, prix-fixe lunch. The upstairs in the bi-level Roman import is a team-up with Ariel Arce, of Tokyo Record Bar, that opened last year.

Arce notes that with reservations more competitive than ever, an even earlier dining time — lunch — is the new post-pandemic, 5 p.m. reservation. “More people have flexible schedules to dine during the day,” she says. “And with the limited demand that all these small restaurants have, the only way to provide more is to open by day.”

Reservations and walk-in seating are both lunch options for the 60-seat ground-level space, though she suggests early in the week as the best time to score a table. Lunch is a rotating menu that can include a Treviso salad with pine nuts and fiore Sardo, cacio e pepe suppli, and mezze maniche alla Amatriciana.

In Tribeca, Houseman, which opened in 2015, is serving lunch for the first time; it’s a statement, considering that the restaurant sits on a stretch of Greenwich Street that historically doesn’t see much daytime foot traffic.

“Our neighborhood has been slow to recover from the pandemic,” owner Ned Baldwin wrote in an email, “however, based on what I see at the subway station in the morning and at the local Sweetgreen during the lunch hour, it looks like people are finally coming back to work.” The restaurant started serving a lunch that includes a chicken tomatillo soup ($21), a fried tilefish sandwich with spicy mayo and pickles ($25), and a littleneck clam and potato dish ($25) on April 2, Tuesday through Friday, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.

He also acknowledges that some big changes in the neighborhood are ushering in more foot traffic, including the new Google location in St. John’s Terminal that opened this season and “the giant Disney headquarters on Spring,” that’s coming in July. “That’s a lot of new mouths in close proximity to Houseman,” Baldwin told Eater. “On the other hand, mostly because of pandemic ups and downs, I’ve started new services enough times by now that I’m mentally ready for lunch to be a slow grow.”

A booked-out restaurant across the river in Brooklyn, Laser Wolf is now taking reservations for Saturday and Sunday lunch (not brunch) that will start May 4 — and the reservations are already gone for the first week of May. As to why they’re rolling out lunch two years after the restaurant debut, it’s “because of the insane demand,” says Brian Jackson, director of food and beverage for the Hoxton Hotel. Daytime can be an expensive undertaking for a restaurant, especially without the same alcohol sales, as three-martini lunches have become largely a thing of the past. But the hotel is better primed than others in the area, with built-in tourists.

“The number one complaint at Laser Wolf still to this day is how hard it is to get a reservation,” he says, “so our goal with lunch is to create additional services for guests to dine and experience Laser Wolf.”

Lunch at Laser Wolf is a prix-fixe menu of $39 ($35 for vegetarian) served family style, just like dinner service. It will include daily selection of four salatim, hummus and pita, and choice of chicken, salmon, or steak shishlik; lamb kofta, or vegetables with rice. Lunch service, from noon to 3 p.m., will be an option on weekends, too. (Seats for May 11 go live this coming Saturday at 10 a.m. and for May 12, this coming Sunday, and so on.)

And while Laser Wolf introduced lunch years after opening, Gabriel Stulman’s Brooklyn restaurant with April Bloomfield, Sailor — a neighborhood spot far from the Midtown weekday bustle — rolled out lunch in February, six months after opening, with a menu of grilled cheese and tomato sandwich ($19) and striped bass with sunchokes ($33). Though Fort Greene is sleepy during the week, Stulman has a knack for neighborhood lunch. His other places under the Happy Cooking umbrella — which include Joseph Leonard, Jeffrey’s Grocery, and Fairfax — have historically catered to a daytime as well as a dinner clientele.

The uptown revival from chef Daniel Boulud, Cafe Boulud also just rolled out the midday meal. “The original Cafe Boulud was always open for lunch and drew a crowd that was a wonderful mix of social celebrations and business lunches,” says Boulud. One can imagine the socialite Swans of the new Truman Capote show gabbing over a la carte offerings of oysters, hamachi, a salad, and mains like black truffle croque monsieur ($40), or fusilli primavera ($25 or $42). Lunch is available from noon to 2:30 p.m.

Over in the East Village in the former Odessa space, Superiority Burger started its lunch service on April 1 – serving fries for the first time in its near-decade history. As far as why open for lunch, “Part of the dream for Brooks in being in this space was to be open all the time, says partner Sheryl Heefner. “It was the goal from day one.”