How Bars Are Adapting to Gen Z, the Homebody Generation

Photograph by John Taggart

Karson Krouse had to cross state lines to properly celebrate his 21st birthday. He came of legal drinking age in May 2020, when bars and restaurants in his home state of Washington were closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Regulations were looser in neighboring Idaho, so he and friends made the 35-minute drive across the border to toast with celebratory drinks. Krouse did not envision spending his milestone birthday seated and masked at a table at least six feet from other patrons. But he was grateful for the chance to go out at all. Many others in his cohort weren’t so lucky.

Now, as those young adults enter their mid-20s—an age when prior generations would have been fully in their club-going era—they’re reckoning with the pandemic’s lasting effect on their attitudes toward bars. For many members of Gen Z who turned 21 in the early days of COVID, the disruption to normal patterns of going out continues to reverberate. They’re still drinking and socializing, but they’ve become accustomed to doing so in backyards and living rooms rather than bars and clubs. The closures and social distancing of 2020 and 2021 has, for many, created a lasting sense that it’s easier to unwind and drink at home.

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“I would say I’m kind of a homebody now,” says Krouse, now 24 and a wildland firefighter in Pomeroy, Washington. “There’s weird things that came out of the pandemic. I do go out a lot less. It would have to be really special occasions—a birthday or bachelor party.”

Bars and their staff thus find themselves in a new role. They’re not only providers of drinks, fun, and hospitality, but also of reassurance. More than half of young people in Gen Z show signs of anxiety, and if their anxiety rises in unfamiliar or social situations, bars can become especially fraught. The pandemic’s disruptions also made many young people feel that they’re now making up for lost time during their rare “going out” moments. This can create heightened pressure to have not just a great time, but the best time. Given this, bars begin to look more like social minefields than spaces to relax.

“Bars in particular are spaces where there's not always an alignment of expectations with why different people are there,” says Mara Stolzenbach, director of strategy at dcdx, a Gen Z research and strategy firm. Some guests might be there to catch up with friends, others to enjoy a drink alone as an escape from a crowded apartment, and still others to potentially flirt with a stranger. It’s not always clear who is who, making some bargoers fearful of misreading social cues. “For young people, we see a lot in our research that COVID created an uncomfortability with uncertainty.”

That’s true of TaChanté Cole, a 25-year-old esthetician in Missoula, Montana. Cole grew up in a close-knit town of 1,500 people, which she says didn’t prepare her well for meeting large groups of strangers all at once. She was hoping to practice that at bars when she turned 21, but the pandemic paused that.

“I already had a little bit of a barrier in knowing how to meet new people and make friends,” Cole says. “By the time things were opening up again, I was uncomfortable with going out and needing to mingle with people.”

Mac Rosenquist, a bartender at Pink Rabbit in Portland, Oregon, sees her role as helping to reduce that friction. Bar staff, she says, are guides whose first priority is to ensure guests are happy.

“The bar staff should be there for you, to help you, to welcome you, to make you feel good about being there,” she says. She encourages questions from guests and loves to talk about her favorite cocktails on the menu. When people find a bar whose staff and atmosphere they click with, Rosenquist says, becoming a regular can further put anxious guests at ease. Feeling familiar with the bar’s layout, menu, and patrons can all help alleviate the stress of a social situation.

Another tool for drawing out home-centric people is simply making a bar feel more like a home. At The Carriage, a wine bar and shop in the college town of Florence, Alabama, co-owner Caleb Banks modeled the bar’s interior and style of service to match the way he throws parties in his own house. Guests are encouraged to move around the space, maybe lounging on a cushy gold couch before transitioning to talk to another group on the sunny patio. Occasionally, an especially mobile guest can be difficult for staff to keep tabs on. “Almost to our detriment, they feel like it’s their place and not a bar,” Banks says.

The bar also offers an upgrade to the “living room pour,” a generous nine-ounce serving of wine that’s a step up from the standard five-ounce pour. Banks says that heftier pour is the way he’d serve a friend, filling their glass in the spirit of camaraderie. From the unfussy wine list—it’s printed on a standard white sheet of paper—to the friendly bartenders’ banter, The Carriage’s aim is to help guests exhale, not overthink.

“When people come to the bar, they are tired of making decisions,” Banks says. “They need to be able to trust you or the bartender behind the bar to tell them what’s good. There’s a comfort in that.”

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Much has been made of how Gen Z is upending food and beverage norms. But in their default to socializing at home, they’re forcing bars back to the fundamentals of hospitality: making guests feel at ease. Where prior generations might have been in the thrall of speakeasies and inscrutable cocktail ingredients, drinkers who turned 21 during the pandemic’s upheaval want an experience with less friction. They’re just here to have a good time, without social hoops to jump through.

It might require some adjustments for bars to draw these homebodies out, but Andrew Roth, CEO of dcdx, says there’s good news: Young people are seeking the social connection that bars and restaurants provide.

“People are leaning on food and beverage as the way through. That is what is promising about this,” Roth says. “We recognize, as a generation, that things like dinner parties and these spaces are the solution. We’re just not sure how to do it.”

Originally Appeared on Bon Appétit