These days, when Tuli Parubets goes out for dinner, she dresses up and makes a date of it. It wasn’t always that way. She used to dine out four or five times a week, but rising costs have cut that down to just a couple of outings, making each meal feel more like an occasion. The 47-year-old mortgage broker points to everything from the new 18 per cent baseline tip to $24 cocktails as the reason she’s become more selective.
A 2025 Restaurants Canada report found three in four Canadians are eating out less (and it’s 81 per cent among those aged 18 to 34). “I am specific about where I eat and what I try,” Parubets says. As the cost of dining rises, so do her expectations: friendly service and personalized attention from owners have become essential.
Five years ago, according to Prime Seafood Palace and Our House Hospitality Company director of operations Keegan Ferguson, a fine dining room in this city was a mix. “You had occasion tables, but you also had regulars on a Tuesday, industry people, someone stopping in for a dozen oysters and a glass of Chablis on the way home,” he says. “That casual layer has thinned out considerably.” He’s found that guests arrive researched: they’ve read the menu online, seen the room, know what they want before they sit down, come with specific questions about dry-aging, about where the fish came from that morning, about the producer on a given bottle. “The questions are sharper than they were three years ago,” Ferguson says. “When a guest is dining out four times a month, one imperfect night is a rounding error. When they are dining out once a quarter and they chose you, there is no next time to make it right. Every table is a first impression and a final impression at the same moment.”
Now, some establishments are coming up with unique ways to make patrons feel special…and come back. “We still have our regulars, but many guests try out new places every time they dine out, hoping to unearth some real gems,” says Minami general manager Nicholas Teehan. They have onboarded TABLZ, a premium reservation service that allows diners to select a specific table (like one of their signature booths) for a small fee. They also recently launched monogrammed linen coasters, and provide hand-written cards signed by the manager for all anniversaries, signed and sealed with an Aburi kanji wax seal.
156 also does heavy traffic in birthdays, anniversaries and other special occasions; their team writes a personal handwritten note and gives guests a Polaroid photo as a keepsake. “I definitely feel that guests’ expectations have increased compared to a few years ago,” according to co-owner and chef MJ Jeong. “As people dine out less frequently, they seem to be more selective about where they go and expect every part of the experience to be worthwhile.”
At Prime Seafood Palace, occasion notes on reservations are up significantly and reservation lead time has stretched. “A far larger share of our book now carries a note telling us what the night means,” says. Pre-shift, every occasion, allergy, preference and prior visit is logged and read so that servers can remember a favourite drink order or past occasion spent there.
And if people are usually only coming for special occasions — or, like Parubets, just much less often — then the stakes to keep them can feel terrifying. “The pressure on restaurants is certainly higher because every guest’s visit matters more than it used to,” says Adam Minster, co-founder of Sara and Rasa. “If someone only dines out once or twice a month, there’s much less room for an average experience.” So they switched Sara to a tasting-menu model. “If guests are going to spend one of their few nights out with us, we wanted to create an experience that felt complete from beginning to end. Not just a great meal, but an evening people would remember,” he says. To make it feel even more accessible, they’ve coached their team to have genuine conversations about the dishes rather than recite scripts. This is the kind of service 42-year-old financial services director Erin Maloney prioritizes these days, now that she’s eating out less due to rising costs. She only eats at independent restaurants that are less prone to aggressive upselling, where servers are well-versed in the menu and care deeply about the diner experience, providing service that is “attentive but not fussy.”
“Customer behaviour has dramatically changed in the last year,” according to Emad Yacoub, founder and CEO of the Glowbal Restaurant Group. His joint, Riley’s, is leaning into old-school service moves to stand out from the pack. Napkins being replaced. Chairs being pushed in. Tableside service. “Those are the small details that make the difference,” he says.
But make one wrong move and it can result in a damning review that will live online forever. Now, Ferguson says, a single service can become a permanent public record inside of an hour: there is no quiet bad night anymore. “That is a genuinely new form of pressure and I do not think the industry has fully reckoned with what it does to people who are already working 60-hour weeks on their feet,” he says. “Does it follow me home? Yes. Anyone in this business who says otherwise is performing.”
