Despite Rising Inflation, Restaurants Are Having a Big Winter-OxBig News Network

This winter, Denver has faced record-breaking Arctic blasts — below-zero temperatures, heavy snowfalls and brutal wind chills. But at Barolo Grill, a longtime Italian fixture in the affluent Cherry Creek neighborhood, the mood is warm. The restaurant has just logged its most lucrative January and February since it opened in 1992.

“It is actually a bit bewildering,” said the owner, Ryan Fletter. “I am thrilled and surprised.”

The first two months of the year are typically the slowest period for restaurants, and many take a January hiatus. This winter has posed even more challenges: frigid weather across the country, egg prices at a record high and fears that food costs will continue to rise. Overall consumer spending in the United States fell in January for the first time in nearly two years.

Yet Americans have been dining out in unusual numbers, and spending more money doing it. January sales at eating and drinking places were $98.6 billion, almost $2 billion higher than in January 2024 when adjusted for inflation, according to census data analyzed by the National Restaurant Association. (February figures have not yet been released.) The number of diners this January and February was about 5 percent higher than a year earlier, according to data from OpenTable.

Many restaurants, both casual and high-end, report that business in both months was surprisingly robust. At Barolo, even as menu prices have stayed the same, the average check has increased by about 10 percent, Mr. Fletter said. Diners “are having a nicer bottle of wine, they are consuming more food, they are doing tasting menus and not à la carte.”

In interviews, restaurateurs offered several theories for the unexpected boom. Unemployment rates are low. Some said diners were less stressed and more interested in socializing because it’s not an election year. Others said customers were seeking comfort amid the unpredictability of the changes coming out of the White House.

But most simply expressed relief.

“No one really knows why,” said Emily Yuen, the chef of Lingo, a Japanese American restaurant in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where January was the fourth-best month for sales in its nearly two-year existence. She said neighboring restaurateurs she has spoken to have experienced similar bumps. “Obviously,” she said, “we are happy to welcome the increase.”

Neither Ms. Yuen nor Robert Hsu, an owner, anticipated such a busy winter, so they didn’t hire enough staff. “We were struggling to keep up with the demand,” Mr. Hsu said.

Several restaurants, including Che Fico in San Francisco, Raf’s and Musket Room in Manhattan and Ava Gene’s in Portland, Ore., said that a dramatic uptick in private events — most of them corporate gatherings or belated holiday parties — added to their winter gains. At Ava Gene’s, event sales in January were up 450 percent from the previous January, and even beat December numbers, said John Bissell, the executive chef.

(That post-holiday spike was echoed in the National Restaurant Association’s analysis, which found that revenue in January was almost $1 billion higher than in December, typically the busiest time for restaurants.)

“Portland was pretty slow to come out of the pandemic and the pandemic mentality,” Mr. Bissell said. “I really think that this holiday season is when we started seeing a lot more get-togethers.”

Inflation may seem like a deterrent for diners, but the data tell a different story, said Debby Soo, the chief executive of OpenTable. Even with runaway inflation in the summer of 2022, the number of diners nationally that June was 26 percent higher than in June 2019, according to OpenTable data.

“When people were worried about a recession, about supply chain shortages, they still made room in their household budget for the meal they have at a restaurant,” she said. “That trend is continuing.”

Not every restaurant has escaped the winter slump. Krupa Grocery, a neighborhood restaurant in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn, recently sent an email to guests asking them to come dine and invite their friends, as “winter’s been super rough.”

While revenue at the Nashville wine bar Bad Idea has picked up this winter, its chef, Colby Rasavong, said that every other local restaurateur he has spoken to has reported sluggish traffic.

This season’s business may look particularly good because the last few winters have been so bad, said Doug Psaltis, the chef and co-owner of Andros Taverna, Asador Bastian and Mano a Mano in Chicago, where over the last two months sales were up 5 percent from a year earlier, and the number of tables served was up 35 percent.