“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.
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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.”
Curated, meal-centric mixers claim to provide lonely Gen Z’ers a pathway to IRL friendship in the city. But can a lasting bond form while simply breaking bread?
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.”