Gen Z's hottest club: The local dive bar

Clara Greenstein, a 28-year-old who lives in Queens, New York, can be found several nights a week at her local bar, The Seneca. The spot serves good burgers and drinks for a good price, but the main draw is a pool table. Greenstein entered a tournament about two years ago, and now she's inherited the role of running it. "I get a free hamburger every week and get to basically have office hours for all my friends," she tells me. On a night when she's got nothing to do, she'll pop in after work and end up "just sitting at the bar like it's 1995" after her tech job, rather than bingeing shows or doom scrolling. "I've never gone there and not seen a familiar face."

Exhausted from years of chasing exclusive reservations and trendy foods from viral videos and ordering app deliveries from ghost kitchens, young adults in America are now looking closer to home for something you can't promote on Instagram and TikTok: their own version of Central Perk or Cheers. These local bars, restaurants, and coffee shops where everybody knows your name are most notable for what they mean to their regulars more than what they're selling to anyone outside of the neighborhood. One person on X described going to the same cafe and tipping generously as "regularmaxxing," saying it had "changed my life."

Tech companies are looking to capitalize on the hunger for regularity, too.

"The connectivity between restaurants and guests has in many ways broken down in the technology age," says Ben Leventhal, cofounder of restaurant reservation app Resy, who in 2022 started Blackbird, an app focused on loyalty rewards for restaurants in a handful of US cities, including New York and Los Angeles. "Restaurants love to connect with new regulars, guests love to become regulars."

Just over half of Americans say they consider themselves a regular at a local restaurant or bar, according to data from OpenTable. That means they go there three or four times a month, and the staff might know their name or their order. Gen Z is less likely than Millennials and Gen X to say they have such a spot. But the restaurant business is relentless. Hype cycles around new openings spur demand, but many close. Empty tables are a major concern for restaurants, and using online reservation platforms to fill seats became highly desirable. A 2025 report from the National Restaurant Association found that fast casual, quick service, and coffee shops were likely to have loyalty programs, but even 20% of fine dining and 41% of casual sit-down restaurants also said they have rewards. A majority of those who had such programs said they believed they had led to increased customer traffic.

Big chains bolstered their loyalty programs with apps in the 2010s — earn free drinks at Starbucks, get extra points for placing your Dunkin' order to go. Many loyalty programs gobbled up customer data in exchange for free treats, and some have left customers with diminishing returns, sometimes also cutting out the entirety of the barista-customer interaction with apps (Starbucks, for one, recently encouraged baristas to adorn to-go cups with hand-written messages to build rapport with guests). When it comes to internet, cell phone bills, and credit cards, customer loyalty isn't always rewarded; the services often creep up in cost over time.

Now tech companies are focusing on bringing perks to diners who aren't only opting for big chain restaurants. There's Dorsia, which allows subscribers to book tables at the most exclusive restaurants, and some American Express cardholders get the privilege of grabbing reservations on Resy that are sometimes blocked from public view. But there's growing interest in not just getting people into the most desired seats, but to make them regular diners at regular spots, and facilitating the exchange of customer data for perks and a better experience. The Blackbird app offers crypto-based reward perks for spending at restaurants in the app's network. "We're focusing on rewarding loyalty, motivating people to be loyal to places that they love," Leventhal says. The driving idea is that people can use the app to reserve a table and pay — all while the app tells the restaurant who you are and what you like — say, if you typically eat a certain type of cuisine, and your location, but it's also testing a feature where restaurants receive a short summary about patrons that can include their average tip amount. Money spent via the Blackbird app increased by 1,000% in 2025, and there are now more than 1,000 restaurants partnered with Blackbird. "And hopefully in doing so, we are creating essentially the next version of the restaurant economy, where guests and restaurants are closely connected and restaurants have the tools to find and cultivate new regulars." There's Bilt, the rent rewards platform that highlights some 20,000 partnered restaurants across the country, and offers up to six times on points for people who throw down their Bilt Mastercards at the spots. "What we're building goes beyond the four walls of your apartment; we're connecting you with your entire neighborhood and making every aspect of where you live more rewarding," Ken Chenault, chairman of Bilt, said in a statement last summer that also announced that Bilt's valuation has surpassed $10 billion.

Smaller businesses are also starting their own loyalty programs and building fan bases. At Talea, a New York City brewery that has five locations, customers can sign up for a loyalty program on an app. There are discounts to earn and exclusive "insider only" events to attend. It's a move that's more sophisticated than bringing a punch card to your local barista to get a 10th coffee for free. Tara Hankinson, co-founder of Talea, says the brewery wants "to offer a great value to the people who spend a lot of time and money and make memories with us." That means "unique experiences, unique access behind the scenes, and really bringing people together to celebrate."

But many of the best connections aren't those facilitated by an app or a formal program, and come as people seek out that homey, regular "Friends" feeling. Lynne Miller, a 35-year-old who lives in Ontario and works in marketing, says she set a goal for herself last year to become a regular somewhere. It ended up being Holly's Neighbourhood Cafe & Bar, where she sits in the same seat each week to work for a few hours at the same time on Thursday mornings (it's blocked off on her calendar, so she's fully committed). Miller has gotten to know other coffee lovers, the baristas, and the owner. "It's not for the 'Gram," Miller says. "It's because you actually crave a real-life community experience and connection."

Allison Memmo is a regular at her local Philadelphia brewery, Humble Parlor. Last year, she watched dozens of Phillies games there, competing in a fan competition in which the brewery gives a stamp to patrons for every game they stop in during a baseball game. Her dog, Starling, even became a regular with a stamp card. For Memmo, a 34-year-old editor, the competition to watch the most games became even more serious when she and her top opponent started dating. The two became a couple and ultimately tied for first place. Their prize: bricks on the wall bearing their names, and a special day when all their friends at the brewery will come together to celebrate them. Memmo has had a regular neighborhood bar before, but says this is the first time she's gotten so close with the owners and customers. "Everyone is actually friends," she tells me.

A pre-pandemic trend favored introversion, canceling plans as self-care, and staying in to binge watch TV. Now, more people see that having a village means showing up, and showing up repeatedly. Becoming a regular takes quieter, repeated work, and the rewards are often subtle. Payton Tysinger, a 26-year-old who moved from Miami to Boston last year, has made it a goal to "build community through the mundane actions of life." He goes to the same coffee shop when he commutes to his office for his marketing job, the same bakery on the weekends, and is trying to become a regular at bar trivia. "It's an opportunity in this non-digital, analog renaissance to centralize living, and I don't mean living in the sense of like, slay, live, let's go take this trip to Ibiza or whatever," he says. "I mean living in the sense of the nitty gritty of being a human being."

Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.