Tag: comfort food dining behaviour India cities

Divya Aggarwal, Chief Growth Officer at Impresario Entertainment and Hospitality, explains the shift toward mood led dining, late nights and community routines

Hyderabad, January 13, 2026: Everyday routines increasingly replaced occasion driven outings in 2025, with people choosing familiar spaces that could adapt to different moods and times of day. This shift is reflected in SOCIAL 2025 Wrapped, an annual data led release that examines how guests across Indian cities used SOCIAL’s café bar spaces through the year.
The findings point to SOCIAL functioning less as a destination for specific celebrations and more as an all day, all mood environment. Guests used the spaces for workday meals, informal meetings, live music, late night gatherings, and delivery, often returning multiple times and building personal routines around the format rather than dropping in sporadically.

Commenting on the behavioural patterns, Divya Aggarwal, Chief Growth Officer at Impresario Entertainment and Hospitality, said that 2025 marked a clear move away from occasion led dining. She noted that people stepped out not only to celebrate, but to seek comfort, familiarity, or a brief reset, whether through food, music, community events, or late night delivery.
Data from the year shows that SOCIAL hosted 2,025 community events and over 2,100 live music gigs across cities, reinforcing its role as a multi use cultural space. These events ranged from karaoke nights and open mics to workshops, sports screenings, bazaars, and game led formats, drawing repeat participation from local communities.

Food choices through the year reflected comfort driven behaviour. Guests consumed 1,46,055 bowls of ramen, 1,13,825 plates of chaat, and 63,275 servings of K Krispy Lotus Stems. Certain dishes moved at a steady pace throughout the year, with Fully Reloaded Nachos selling every 1.25 minutes, Couch Potato Platters every 4.25 minutes, and Boss Fried Chicken Burgers every 5 minutes, underscoring the role of familiar, shareable food in social dining.
An all day beverage culture also emerged. SOCIAL served over 81 million millilitres of cocktails and shots in 2025, including Banarasi Patiala, Longest Long Island Iced Tea, Longest Long Island Iced Coffee, and SOCIAL Kamikrazy, while continuing to operate as a café where cutting chai and matcha coexisted comfortably. This blend reflected the overlap between work hours, casual catch ups, and late evening socialising.

Delivery patterns highlighted SOCIAL’s relevance beyond in person dining. During the year, the brand delivered over 15,000 kilograms of biryani, with nearly half of all delivery orders placed after 11 pm. Loyalty also deepened, with more new Social Club members joining in 2025 than the seating capacity of a sold out DY Patil Stadium event. At the extreme end of engagement, one guest spent ₹3.63 lakh at SOCIAL over the year.
Alongside performance metrics, the data also captured everyday realities of shared social spaces. Over 4,82,000 tissue rolls went missing, more than 9,000 glasses were broken, the phrase “chal, last drink” was heard over 87,000 times, and close to 42,000 guests stayed until closing, offering a human lens to how people used the spaces.

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