The new night out: Why hospitality is moving beyond food and drink
A restaurant reservation once came with a fairly straightforward promise: a table, a menu and a meal. Drinks might follow, perhaps at another address, before the evening came to an end. That familiar sequence is increasingly being reconsidered by hospitality businesses looking at how people want to spend their time outside the home.
In Kolkata, two different approaches offer a glimpse of this shift. At SYNTHE, the conventional cocktail menu gives way to an omakase experience in which guests trust the bar to guide their drinking journey. At TUA, the idea is to let dinner develop into cocktails, music and dancing, removing the familiar division between a restaurant and a nightlife destination.
The formats differ, but the question they raise is similar: what are people really buying when they go out? Is it a meal or a drink, or the experience of spending an evening in a particular environment?
“At SYNTHE, I think we are designing how people spend a night. Food and drink are the mediums through which we create that experience,” says the spokesperson. “The omakase format is a big part of this because it allows us to take the guest on a journey rather than asking them to simply choose from a menu.”
The concept challenges one of the established conventions of going to a bar, where the menu gives customers control over what they order. At SYNTHE, the reservation-led experience revolves around 11 cocktails and 22 curated small plates, organised around an imagined future of drinking. The journey is divided into four chapters, Curiosity, Connection, Freedom and After Midnight, with beverage consultant Ankur Chawla shaping the cocktail programme.
For the guest, the proposition is less about selecting a preferred spirit or familiar cocktail and more about allowing the experience to unfold. That requires a different understanding of hospitality, one in which the ability to anticipate a customer's preferences becomes as important as the ability to execute an order.
“I don’t think it is about taking away the choice. It is more about replacing choice with trust. When a guest allows us to guide their experience, the responsibility on us becomes much bigger,” the spokesperson says.
“In an omakase format, you are essentially saying, ‘trust us and let us take you somewhere.’ We have to understand their mood, their pace and what they might enjoy, and then create something that feels personal rather than forced. I think good hospitality is often about anticipating what someone will enjoy before they even ask for it.”
The idea is significant because it turns a familiar service interaction into a relationship built on expectation and delivery. The guest relinquishes some control, but the business takes on the obligation to make that decision worthwhile. The success of the format therefore depends on more than novelty. The food, drinks, pacing and attentiveness must justify the trust placed in the people running the experience.
It also suggests that the role of a menu is changing, rather than disappearing altogether.
“I don’t think menus are becoming obsolete, but I do think their role is changing. Traditionally, a menu tells you what you can eat or drink. Today, it can also be a way of telling a story and creating curiosity,” the spokesperson says.
“At SYNTHE, the menu and the omakase experience are designed to encourage discovery. You may not know exactly what is coming next, but you trust the process. The consumption will always matter, but the feeling, surprise and memory attached to it matters just as much.”
This emphasis on discovery reflects a broader question for hospitality operators trying to distinguish themselves in a crowded market. A restaurant can offer a particular cuisine and a bar can build its identity around a drinks programme, but an experience-led format attempts to give customers a reason to remember the entire evening, rather than an individual dish or cocktail.
The spokesperson attributes some of this appetite to changing consumer exposure to travel, music, design and international hospitality.
“The Indian diner today is much more exposed to global culture, travel, music, design and hospitality. People are not going out only because they are hungry or thirsty anymore. They are going out to experience something and to be part of something,” the spokesperson says.
“They want identity, atmosphere, discovery and a sense of belonging. I think the best restaurants and bars today can almost become their own little worlds.”
At SYNTHE, even the 30-seat format is intended to support that more intimate relationship between the guest and the experience. The smaller scale makes personal attention part of the proposition, rather than treating it as an additional layer of service.
But creating a distinct environment is only one part of the change. The other is the growing possibility of treating dinner, drinking and nightlife as different stages of a single evening.
TUA approaches this from another direction. Its dance-and-dine format is built around the idea that dinner need not mark the end of one activity before another begins. Food, cocktails, music and dancing can become parts of the same social occasion. Chef Vaibhav Bhargava's contemporary, shareable food follows that emphasis on bringing people together.
“I think the boundaries between dining, drinking and nightlife are becoming much more fluid. People don’t necessarily want to go to three different places for dinner, drinks and dancing anymore. They want the night to evolve naturally,” the spokesperson says.
“At SYNTHE, music, cocktails, food, hospitality and atmosphere are all designed to work together. The idea is not to create separate experiences but to create one continuous night that changes character as it progresses. For us, the music and atmosphere are as much a part of the experience as what is in the glass.”
Such thinking shifts the focus from individual offerings to the transitions between them. A meal can become a longer social occasion, while a bar can be more than a destination for drinks. For operators, the challenge is to ensure that the different elements feel connected rather than assembled simply to extend the time a customer spends at the venue.
There is also a tension at the heart of experience-led hospitality. While businesses need to understand what customers enjoy, they must also offer something beyond what customers already know. Too much familiarity risks making a venue interchangeable with its competitors; too much experimentation can leave guests feeling that the experience was designed for the concept rather than for them.
“I think it is a bit of both. If you only design around what people already know they want, you are always responding to the present. As creators, I think part of our responsibility is to introduce people to things they didn’t know they would enjoy,” the spokesperson says.
That philosophy informs SYNTHE's decision to build its cocktail experience around ideas about how drinking might evolve over the next century. Rather than treating the future as a prediction to be made, the concept uses it as a creative starting point, combining familiar ingredients and techniques with less expected presentations.
“We don’t want to simply predict what the future of drinking looks like. We want to be part of creating it,” the spokesperson says.
Whether customers are ready to surrender their cocktail choices or prefer a venue where dinner gradually gives way to dancing, the underlying ambition is to make going out feel like more than a transaction. The shift also places greater demands on hospitality businesses. An inventive concept may attract initial attention, but its staying power depends on the quality of the food and drinks, the consistency of the service and whether guests genuinely enjoy spending time there.
For the industry, the more interesting question may not be whether menus or conventional restaurant formats will disappear. It is whether hospitality can make the entire evening as considered as the meal itself, giving people a reason to stay, explore and return.