The Indulgent Pleasure of a Very Late Dinner

In America, the average dinner time is 6:22 p.m. Some folks choose to eat well after 9 p.m.
Illustration of a fork poking the moon on a purple background with a few stars around.
Illustration by Hazel Zavala

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Dorothy Bain, a 63-year-old retired nurse in Laurinburg, North Carolina, sometimes cooks steak for dinner, sometimes chicken. What’s constant is when she eats dinner—always between 9 p.m. and 10 p.m.

In the US, where the average dinner time is 6:22 p.m., Bain is an outlier. But hours after many Americans have finished washing dishes and binged a couple of Netflix episodes, a whole world of people are just sitting down to dinner. Bain has been eating her main meal late at night for over 40 years, at first because she worked evenings and then because she got used to it. A nocturnal music producer in Los Angeles eats dinner at 7 a.m., while a creative producer in Brooklyn relishes in a long walk before cooking at 10 p.m.

For them, dining late is an intentional choice. Some eat at these hours because they’re reluctant to admit the day is over, others are hooked on the private indulgence of a pile of pasta eaten alone on the couch. Together, their stories make a case for a somewhat niche practice: the late American dinner.

Mehr Singh, a 27-year-old freelance food writer living in New York City, loves the comfort and luxury of her 9:30 to 11 p.m. dinners. She’ll typically make a curry, braise, or sheet-pan dinner and eat it while streaming her favorite shows. She does it in silence at least four or five nights a week, while everyone else, it seems, sleeps. “There’s a hedonistic element to it,” she says. “It feels like a naughty secret.”

Armen Abrimian, the 30-year-old music producer in LA, eats anytime after midnight—sometimes even later. Most of the audio engineer’s recordings happen after 11 p.m., an industry norm, he says. Abrimian eats “lunch” in the evening and doesn’t want to scarf a meal mid-session. Plus, he’s always done his best creative work late at night. “My friends and I used to joke in college that we make our best beats when we’re hungry,” Abrimian says. After he’s done with work, he’ll order in or quietly make something simple at home, careful not to wake his roommates. “This is going to sound janky,” he says. “But I’ll come home, draw my blinder curtains, put a movie on, and just be eating spaghetti in bed at like 7 a.m.”

Historically speaking, these late dinners are pretty unusual in the U.S. Prior to the industrial revolution, Americans ate dinner around midday, the author and historian Abigail Carroll writes in Three Squares: The Invention of the American Meal. Between the 1760s and mid-1800s, labor shifted from farm to factory. And then, a standardized 9-to-5 became commonplace for many after the Ford Motor Company introduced the practice in the 1920s as a way to curb the exploitation of factory workers. (Twelve years later, the eight-hour workday was standardized by the Fair Labor Standards Act.) Dinner steadily crept later, to 5 or 6 p.m. for these workers, when the family unit could gather.

By the 1900s, this early-evening dinner ritual had also come to embody middle-class values and aspirations. By modeling proper dining etiquette, families could rise in social status and give their children a chance “to try on airs of dignity and to practice their familial and future worldly roles,” writes Carroll. Pop culture reinforced this idea. In Norman Rockwell’s 1943 Thanksgiving scene, Freedom From Want, afternoon-esque light glimmers off white china and an enormous browned turkey.

The evening dinner hour is still somewhat idealized today—as the time when “all that is good and wholesome happens,” says Bryant Simon, a historian and food studies professor at Temple University in Philadelphia. While the 9-to-5 is now a myth for many frazzled office workers, dinner times are still locked around those traditional labor standards, says Simon. Americans continue to eat earlier than many other countries—particularly those in Western and Southern Europe, like in Spain and Italy, where the workday is interrupted by, respectively, a siesta or a riposo.

For a couple of the people I spoke to, eating late helped them feel connected to the cultures they grew up in. “My family is from Iraq, where later and longer dinners with family and friends are more normal,” says Ramy Abdulazziz, a 29-year-old software developer in Boston. He no longer lives at home with his family, but Abdulazziz continues to go out for Middle Eastern food or bowls of ramen with friends around 10:30 p.m. “It’s just a great way to end the day, and connect with the people you’re close to,” he says.

For others, the pandemic loosed cultural norms and shook up their routines. By the end of a quarantine workday, Julia Hanson, a 30-year-old creative producer in Brooklyn, needed to get out of the house. She would spend as much of the evening as possible wandering in nature and listening to podcasts. The buffer allowed her to maximize the daylight hours and demarcate day from night. Dinner, which typically ranged from roast salmon to “the errant turkey meatball,” happened around 10 p.m. Now, Hanson and her boyfriend still prefer it that way. “It feels like a new chapter in the day, rather than a rush to the finish line,” she says.

Of course, not everyone can choose when they eat. Children, elderly dependents, and people who are unable to end the workday on their own time all have to eat food when it’s available. The ability to dine late depends on some inherent autonomy. None of the people I spoke to are carers or parents with kids at home. And more than half have nontraditional careers that allow them to design their whole lives—not just dinner.

But whatever the cultural narrative, eating dinner late doesn’t seem to be doing any major harm to the body, either. While studies have shown that nighttime eaters tend to make poorer food choices than people who eat earlier, late-night dining is not inherently unhealthy on its own. That’s a myth perpetuated by the idea that our bodies don’t need energy from food while we rest, says dietitian Rachael Hartley, RD, LD. “But as I remind my clients, you’re still alive when you’re sleeping.” While eating can affect sleep and vice versa, people thrive on different patterns. “There’s no right time to eat dinner,” Hartley says. “For someone who goes to bed later, a later dinner time makes sense.”

Ideally, people shouldn’t go to bed too full. That could lead to gastric reflux, a situation where stomach acid repeatedly backwashes into your esophagus. “However, as long as you leave some time between dinner and bedtime, it should be fine,” says Hartley, no matter how late that happens.

At this point I will admit that I’m not only writing this article because it’s my job. My boyfriend and I alternate dinner duties each night, and whenever I’m cooking, the food will not be ready before 9:30 p.m. After work, I like to surf in my beach neighborhood and call my family in Australia and go smooth-brained watching the sunset with a spritz. My boyfriend has a chronically persnickety stomach and cannot eat too close to bed or there’ll be hell to pay. “Should I just have leftovers?” he’ll joke (or not joke) whenever I finally get around to peeling carrots.

Many of the people I spoke to shared similar clashes between their eating preferences and those of the people around them. Like me, Abrimian has been at loggerheads with a significant other before, and friends who “won’t eat after midnight,” he says. “Whereas I almost always eat after midnight.” He also laments the lack of options available when ordering in at, say, 4 a.m.

Even if Bain tries to get dinner on the table early when hosting friends or family, it just never happens. Do they get annoyed? “Oh, sure,” she says. “Especially during holiday dinners, because if I’m having company, they’re used to eating in the afternoon or whatever. My dinners are just never that time.”

Singh’s housemates haven’t always been fans of her dinner schedule. “I once had a roommate tell me to not use the microwave late at night,” she says. “And an ex once asked me to not eat chips so close to where he was sleeping. Neither of them were wrong.” When coordinating dinners with friends, she has found a workaround. “If we end up eating earlier than 8 p.m., I’ll come home and have a snack before bed,” she says.

I wondered if each person thought eating late at night represented something deeper about them as people. Abdulazziz suspects the habit might be symbolic of the kind of culture and lifestyle he values. “I don't really enjoy being forced into the type of work model that many conform to, which I think is the cause of what I would call a very westernized dinner culture,” he says. Hanson thinks eating late reveals her drive to be intentional in whatever she’s doing. “Or it’s evidence of my weak grocery planning skills,” she says.

Bain, on the other hand, believes the practice is far more straightforward. “I eat when I want to eat,” she says. “Because I have that freedom.”