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.
