Restaurants are losing the bar tab — and nobody saw it coming.
Alcohol has been the financial backbone of the American dining industry for decades. A $14 glass of wine costs the restaurant roughly $3. The margin on a cocktail makes the margin on a steak look modest. For most full-service restaurants, the bar subsidizes the kitchen. Always has.
Not anymore.
Americans are drinking less. Not dramatically, not all at once — but measurably, consistently, and across demographics. The shift isn't driven by a single cause. It's a combination of GLP-1 medications blunting appetite and cravings, a generation of younger consumers who never developed the drinking habits of their predecessors, and a broader cultural recalibration around wellness that is showing up in behavior, not just in surveys.
The bottom line is, well, the bottom line. Restaurants that built their economics around alcohol as a margin engine are now staring at a structural gap that a better cocktail menu won't close.
Here's what I keep thinking about: this isn't a restaurant story. It's a story about a business model built on a behavioral assumption that quietly stopped being true. Every industry has a version of this. A revenue stream that feels permanent until it doesn't. A customer behavior that felt locked in until it shifted. The assumptions that get buried deepest are the ones that have never been wrong before.
What behavioral assumption is your business model quietly built on — and when did you last actually test it?
-Marc
Brigadoon is small gatherings. Radical curiosity. No PowerPoint slides. An unknown ROI. The kind of conversations you'll still be turning over in your head six months later. If that sounds like your kind of room, you're probably the kind of person we're looking for.
