The Top 17 Restaurant Trends of 2025

The rise of food delivery apps has led to unprecedented analysis paralysis – and even apps to help consumers pick what to eat

The rise of food delivery apps has led to unprecedented analysis paralysis, with consumers taking to TikTok and Reddit for advice. Posts titled, “What should I eat?” rack up millions of views.

Some apps like Tiny Decisions and Food Picker (Featured in Feb 2023) are designed to help users break the deadlock for the sake of deciding, producing answers that are either truly random or close to it.

The Which One app has emerged as a blend of decision-making meets social media. Users can post polls for questions like, “What book should I read next?” or “Which picture should I post on Instagram?”, providing a dual opportunity both for posters to make decisions and scrollers to feel their voice is heard. If your favorite creator or artist pops a question, it even presents a unique chance to be on the inside of their creative process.

While any opinion may be valuable for lower-risk decisions, others require more trustworthy input. Emerging as a modern replacement for business consultants, some startups are developing apps that use AI to provide trustworthy guidance. Platforms like Rationale help business owners and managers to think through the possibilities using simplified analysis.

An increasing number of tools could soon support decision-making across a wide range of fields and perhaps, ironically, introduce a paradox of choice in selecting the right app for the job.

The rise of the sober bar

The large majority of customers at sober bars, which serve craft drinks without alcohol, surprisingly are regular drinkers.

Instead of serving as an experience for former alcoholics as many would think, this growing experience is focused on creating a space where it's socially acceptable to mingle with strangers and spend money on a craft experience without the explicit need for booze. Nearly all sober bars even keep the 21+ rule to help preserve the environment and social context of the bar scene.

Sober bars can capture more revenue and profit than normal bars. They're able to stay open throughout the day as an alternative to coffee dates, increasing revenue. They're also able to increase profits by maintaining prices while lowering costs given the lack of alcohol and liquor licenses.

"Dry January" has been a growing trend the past few years, and serves essentially as a marketing event for these bars and breweries.

Seeking lower costs, faster cook times, restaurants are increasingly smashing their burgers; and customers love it

A small difference in cost can have a big impact at scale. Olives, for example, are not usually seen as a major component of commercial airlines' cost structure, but in the 1980s American Airlines' cost-obsessed CEO saved $40,000 annually by eliminating one olive from the salad served to first-class passengers.

Other companies have tried to shrink costs in similar ways: McDonald’s employees are instructed to fill cups to the very brim with ice before giving the cups to customers heading to the drink machine, as each additional ice cube leads to less space for the slightly more expensive soda.

Sometimes though, cost-cutting measures are seen as a positive by customers too. With whipped soap, which requires less soap per serving (and more air), the soap is able to be sold at a premium.

Smash burgers, an increasingly popular style of fast food burgers, are in a similar bucket. For restaurants, it means faster cook times and less meat per burger, translating to higher profits. And just like how some consumers prefer whipped soap, many prefer smashed burgers too.

As restaurants like In n’ out and Shake Shack have taken to smash burgers, there’s also growing demand among home chefs, leading to a growing market for burger smashers – a spatula for compressing burgers.

New business models take the retail coffee industry by storm

Coffee is a massive industry: Over 2 billion cups of coffee are consumed each day, and Americans drink more coffee than soda, tea, and juice combined. While the coffee shop business has plenty of established players, new entrants are popping up to take advantage of new markets that larger chains won’t touch.

Scooter's Coffee is a coffee chain growing its location count at over 20% annually, through a franchise model that focuses on selling coffee through kiosk-style drive-throughs that have a smaller physical footprint than a traditional store, and a startup cost roughly half that of a Dunkin franchise.

Scooter's has identified a low-cost model that allows them to launch locations in places that competitors can't afford. For Scooter's, this means building smaller stores that are purely drive-through, meaning they save on both startup costs and labor. It’s an attractive deal to someone who wants a side hustle in the restaurant business but can’t afford the startup cost of a larger chain. Many companies have competed with higher-priced brands by letting their customers trade convenience and quality for price; Wish has been able to undercut Amazon on price by selling products to customers who are willing to wait for slow shipping, for example. Scooter’s uses the same approach by starting smaller stores in more out-of-the-way locations.

This means that Scooter's can enter a market too small for a Starbucks and Dunkin—and if that market grows to the point that it can support a competing chain, that chain would then be splitting the market with an incumbent, worsening its economics. That model works for stores in dense places where there's a high value to getting the quickest possible cup of coffee on the way to work. It’s important for coffee companies to be cognizant of what other companies do, because it’s a fiercely competitive market; Dunkin’ Donuts changed its name to Dunkin’ in 2018 in recognition of the fact that 60% of its revenue comes from beverages, not food.

Commercial kitchens flock to induction stoves

Commercial kitchens are flocking to induction stoves for a few simple reasons. First, they have completely flat surfaces so, when not in use, they’re essentially extra kitchen space. The flat surface also means they’re far easier to clean than traditional stoves.

They also can get much hotter, meaning they can, among other things, boil water in half the time, serve customers quicker, and squeeze in more patrons in a given day to earn more revenue.

They also don’t have open flames so the kitchen doesn’t get as hot and many restaurant staff are recording fewer burns during the work day as a result. And while they cost 2x the price upfront, they use far less energy in the long run.

Coffee chains leverage dog-friendly treats to increase daily foot traffic from dog walkers

There’s an ongoing battle between coffee chains over dog walking routes.

Two-thirds of American households own dogs and take them on daily walks. Most times, owners take the same route day after day so a shop that’s on the route, and gets passed every single day, is far more likely to win the dog walker’s business.

To coffee chains, the math is simple: If they can spend a practically negligable bit to grow nearly-guaranteed daily foot traffic, they’ll take it. So in 2015, Starbucks launched the Pup Cup – a small cup of whipped cream. Dogs tend to love it and many owners cite it as one of the top reasons they haven’t changed their routes over time.

It’s not the first time dog marketing has gotten creative: In what is one of history’s most creative marketing stunts, Pedigree – a dog food brand with over $1B in sales – applied stickers of dog food in bowls to city sidewalks and sprayed the stickers with dog food scents. When dogs ran to the stickers and continuously licked them, owners saw exactly what food the dog wanted. Pedigree also strategically placed the stickers in front of pet stores and supermarkets so that owners had this in mind during their purchase decision.

Similarly, many small business marketing guides recommend leaving a bowl of water outside so that dogs stop and owners glance inside the store.

It’s comparable to chain restaurants at rest stops along the interstate highway system. Drivers stop to refill their gas and notice the food chains along the way.

It’s also similar to how some retail storefronts place sugary cereals, or colorful toys, on the bottom shelf, knowing that it’ll attract kids with a parent in tow. The products for adults are then placed at the adults’ eye level. The stores use kids as a hook to target the spender, knowing they come in pairs just like the dog and its owner.

Soju bars are on the rise

The single most consumed liquor brand on the planet isn’t a whiskey, vodka, rum, or gin; It’s a Soju.

In the US, liquor laws give Soju a surprising boost. Because of its low alcohol content, it can be sold at restaurants that have a beer and wine license but no liquor license, which often costs more, even though Soju is seen by consumers as a liquor.

In fact, several soju-adjacent alcoholic beverages were able to get their drinks reclassified as soju - to the dismay of many traditional Korean distilleries - just to reap the regulatory benefits.

One reason for Soju’s early success is the Korean industrial development model. In the 60s and 70s, the Korean government offered multiple businesses in the same industry access to below-market-rate loans to support their growth. When an industry went through a downturn, the government encouraged the stronger players to buy out weaker ones, putting the best management in charge of the entire industry. The government applied this model to cars, chemicals, electronics—and liquor, creating the massive Hite Jinro beverage conglomerate.

In Soju’s home market of Korea, the beverage benefits from a liquor-first drinking culture. Korea’s liquor consumption is the highest in the world, at an average of almost 14 shots per adult per week, compared to roughly 6 in Russia.

More recently, Soju has benefited from Korea’s cultural moment. The rise of K-pop and the growing success of Korean movies internationally has renewed interest in Korean culture, and Soju—rarely seen in music videos but ubiquitous in Korean TV dramas—is one more way to experience it. And unlike some other forms of content-driven consumption, the revenue from selling them scales as people get more involved in the trend.