I think it was mainly a change in culture. Families seemed bigger, and homes were not much entertainment centers, and the culture predominated for whom going out to eat a steak dinner was a real event. Many or most of whom were baby boomers, who are now dad or in nursing homes.
But related to demographics, it is competition and the type of it that negatively affect restaurants like Hilltop:
..wrote Eugene Wei, a technologist and writer who is currently the head of video at Oculus, in a 2015 essay. “It’s hard to think of any sphere of American life where the selection and quality have improved so much as food,” the economist Tyler Cowen, who moonlights as a food blogger, wrote this year. For the first time in US history, Americans are spending more money dining out than in grocery stores.
But if it’s truly the golden age of restaurants, why is there such widespread concern about the state of the restaurant industry? Last year was “the worst restaurant year since the recession,” according to QSR Magazine. Dinner “traffic,” the industry term for the number of walk-in customers, has been falling for five straight years, says market-research firm NPD Group Inc. The lunch business is in a veritable depression.
Restaurants have grown from 25 percent of food spending in the 1950s to more than half, today. The shift has been accelerating: In the last decade, spending at restaurants and bars has grown twice as fast as all other retail spending, like clothes and cars.
But today there are simply too many places to eat, according to Victor Fernandez, executive director at Black Box Intelligence, a restaurant data firm. “Half of our food dollar is now going to restaurants, but we have more supply than we have demand,” he said.
The decline in traffic, along with rising labor costs, has forced restaurateurs to raise their prices to pay the rent. As a result, dining out is getting more expensive. The relative price of “food away” (government-speak for restaurants and snacks) versus food at home (government-speak for groceries) has never been higher,
For cheap eats, fast food remains a huge and growing market. On the high end, both the fine-dining and fast casual sectors are growing, even if individual restaurants are struggling to eke out market share in a hyper-competitive environment. But then there’s the middle-class of restaurants, also known as “casual dining”—full-service restaurants where the typical check is between $15 and $25, per person. This is where the pain lives.
Excepts from lengthy read at https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/06/its-the-golden-age-of-restaurants-in-america/530955/
That’s a real interesting analysis of the restaurant industry. It seems to conform to what I’ve noticed around here.