While in the peninsula the end of traditional late Spanish dinners is being debated as a new wellness trend driven by teleworking and social media, in Lanzarote there are many more factors and from longer ago.
Among them, the fact that the sun sets an hour earlier according to the clock and due to the enormous weight of international tourism when setting the schedules for island restaurants.
For the restaurant industry, early dinners are full of advantages. It allows for better concentration and organization of work, for example, with more employees on a continuous schedule instead of the traditional split shifts of the Spanish hospitality industry.
A few weeks ago, the New York Times published an article highlighting data from the two giants of reservation management: according to CoverManager, half of dinner reservations in Spain are already made before nine in the evening (compared to 27% a decade ago).
Meanwhile, data from TheFork confirms that reservations at eight in the evening have almost tripled since 2016, while the ten o'clock slot has halved and almost no one dines at eleven anymore.
The clock's proof: Lanzarote turns off the stoves an hour and a half before Madrid
In Lanzarote the trend is fully consolidated. While in peninsular cities like Madrid the norm is to keep kitchens open until 11:00 PM or 11:30 PM, in Lanzarote the dynamic is very different.
Largely due to the traditional adaptation of supply to European customs. Simply by analyzing the opening and closing hours of kitchens on the island, it can be inferred that eight out of ten dinners in Lanzarote are concentrated before nine in the evening, far exceeding the 50% recorded on the mainland.
Furthermore, the eight in the evening slot is consolidated as the majority in the Conejera restaurant industry, accounting for around 35% of room occupancy —compared to 15% nationally.
Dining after ten in Lanzarote is almost impossible since most of the island's kitchens are already closed by then, except for some restaurants in Arrecife during weekends. And no one thinks of having dinner at eleven, except for some clueless peninsular tourist.
It is even more evident in the main tourist centers of the island, such as Playa Blanca, Puerto del Carmen, or Costa Teguise, where the vast majority of restaurants serve their last kitchen order before ten.
Also in Lanzarote, the custom of not closing kitchens in the afternoon arrived much earlier. The fact that the island's stoves are kept on continuously also facilitates early dinners.
Furthermore, the clock and its relationship with the sun are important. When Franco decided in 1942 to advance the peninsula's time to coincide with Germany's, "night" began to arrive later on the peninsula, but this did not happen in the Canary Islands.
On the other hand, science is categorical about it: dining two or three hours before going to bed improves digestion and nighttime rest. Thus, dining at eight in the evening has become consolidated as a new indicator of well-being, although, at the same time, one of the most typically Spanish customs, which surprised our visitors so much just a few years ago, is disappearing.
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