Why Do We Keep Going Back to the Same Restaurant?

The usual restaurant has already answered questions you no longer notice

Think about how much information is missing when you see a restaurant for the first time.

The photos might tell you what the food looks like, assuming the photos are recent. Google tells you where the restaurant is, but not whether finding a parking space at 8pm will make you regret going. A menu tells you what dishes cost, although sometimes you have to search through Instagram highlights, Google photos and somebody's two-year-old review just to find one.

You might want to know whether it is noisy, whether portions are large enough to share, whether the queue moves quickly, whether the restaurant accepts reservations, whether your parents will enjoy it, whether the air-conditioning is freezing, whether the “spicy” noodles are Malaysian spicy or tourist spicy.

Nobody consciously writes all of these questions down. But the questions exist.

At a restaurant you have visited twenty times, many of them disappeared a long time ago.

A 2024 review looked across 111 restaurant studies and identified 117 factors related to restaurant choice, patronage and satisfaction. The factors ran across food, service, atmosphere, price and value, behavioural intentions, beliefs, experiences and company. Food appeared particularly important overall, but the authors also warned that importance changes with situations such as lunch versus dinner and weekdays versus weekends.¹

That sounds obvious until you think about what it means. There is probably no permanent list in your head that says Restaurant A is your number one restaurant, Restaurant B is number two and Restaurant C is number three. The ranking keeps changing.

The place you would choose for an anniversary may be completely wrong for lunch before a 2pm meeting. The restaurant you would happily drive forty minutes to on Saturday might lose to the kopitiam downstairs on Tuesday.

Malaysian diners put past experience surprisingly high on the list

One of the more useful studies for this question was conducted in Malaysia.

Researchers surveyed restaurant customers and obtained 539 usable responses. Participants ranked nine factors that could influence restaurant choice: price, word of mouth, personal or past experience, menu variety, popularity, reputation, location, promotions and online reviews.

In that sample, personal or past experience ranked third overall, behind price and word of mouth.²

View the underlying ranking data

Factor	Mean rank
Price	3.798
Word of mouth	4.588
Past experience	4.757
Menu variety	4.811
Popularity	4.811
Reputation	4.839
Location	5.182
Sales promotion	6.095
Online reviews	6.115

That is worth sitting with for a moment. An owner's instinct may be to look outward when trying to understand why somebody chose the restaurant. Maybe it was the Instagram post. Maybe they saw a review. Maybe there was a promotion.

Yet one of the strongest pieces of information a diner can possess is much simpler: I've been there before.

The same study also found that the ranking changed with the reason people were dining out. Price mattered most for quick meals or convenience and for social occasions. Brand reputation rose to the top for business dining. Word of mouth mattered most for celebrations.²

View the occasion data

Dining occasion	Top-ranked factor	Mean rank	n
Quick meal / convenience	Price	3.508	252
Social occasion	Price	3.784	162
Business necessity	Reputation	3.483	29
Celebration	Word of mouth	3.927	96

This stops us from turning “past experience matters” into another universal rule. There are nights when familiarity is extremely valuable and nights when the job of the meal changes.

If I am taking an important client out, perhaps I care more about reputation than whether I know the best place to park. If I am having lunch between meetings, the opposite may be true.

The same customer can behave like a different customer three hours later.

There is also an important limitation in the Malaysian study. Participants were asked to recall a recent visit to a restaurant that was different in some way from restaurants they commonly patronised. It was a descriptive ranking study, not an experiment where researchers randomly changed familiarity and watched restaurant choice happen. The sample also leaned toward younger working adults.²

So “past experience ranked third” should not become “past experience is always the third most important reason Malaysians choose restaurants.” The defensible conclusion is narrower: previous experience is clearly part of the restaurant decision, and the decision changes with context.

Familiarity follows us all the way onto the menu

Suppose your friends finally convince you to try the new Korean restaurant. You have already accepted the novelty of the restaurant. New place, new menu, new environment.

Then you spend six minutes looking at dishes you have never tried and order fried chicken.

A 2024 study in Appetite looked specifically at how people choose meals when eating out. The researchers began with 21 semi-structured interviews and identified 16 distinct meal-choice strategies across general restaurants, fast-food outlets, pubs and upscale restaurants. They then ran a second study to examine how frequently those strategies were used.

Three of the most common approaches were very ordinary: look for the meal that seems most enjoyable, look for something budget-friendly, or look for something familiar or habitual.³

You can spend half an hour convincing your friends to try somewhere new and then order the closest thing on the menu to what you always eat.

Novelty and familiarity are not switches where one must be on and the other off. They can exist at different layers of the same dinner. The restaurant might be new. The cuisine might be familiar. The dish might be safe. The sauce might be something you have never tasted.

Trying something unfamiliar can involve a small amount of risk

“Risk” sounds dramatic when talking about dinner. Most of us are not standing outside a restaurant thinking we are about to make a dangerous financial decision.

But you can lose RM42 on a meal you hate. You can waste an evening. You can choose badly for the group. You can order something that arrives looking nothing like what you imagined.

Research in an authentic Chinese-restaurant context found that risk-taking behaviour significantly predicted menu choice. Menu choice was then connected with whether the experience confirmed or disappointed expectations, which in turn affected satisfaction.⁴

Another experiment used a 2 × 2 design involving dish names and ingredient familiarity. Among 221 usable participants, unfamiliar ingredients increased both perceived authenticity and perceived risk. An unfamiliar dish could therefore become more attractive in one way and less attractive in another at exactly the same time.⁵

Imagine seeing sea cucumber on a menu when you have never eaten it. The unfamiliar ingredient could make the restaurant feel more authentic. You came here for something you cannot cook at home, after all. But you might also wonder whether you will hate it.

Those two reactions can coexist.

This is why I hesitate to call every repeat customer loyal

A restaurant sees the same person six times and naturally thinks it has created loyalty. Maybe it has. But behaviour alone cannot tell us why the behaviour happened.

Imagine someone works three doors away from a restaurant and eats there twice a week. They know the lunch set is RM16.90 and comes out quickly. The food is decent. Then that person changes jobs. They never return.

Were they loyal? Or was the restaurant simply the easiest acceptable answer to lunch?

There is no insult in that distinction. Convenience is real value. Familiarity is real value. Predictability is real value. But calling all repeat behaviour “loyalty” can hide what is actually holding the relationship together.

The Malaysian choice study gives us one reason to be careful. Personal experience mattered, but so did price, word of mouth, menu variety, reputation and the occasion.² The 2024 meal-choice study gives us another. Habitual choices were common, but so were enjoyment and budget-driven choices.³

A repeat customer can therefore be returning for several reasons that look identical at the cashier.

Then the whole familiarity argument starts to break

If familiarity is so useful, why don't we eat at the same restaurant forever?

Because knowing exactly what will happen can eventually become the problem.

The same dish that once felt reassuring can become boring. The room you used to like stops being interesting. Nobody has anything left to discover on the menu.

Researchers surveyed 617 respondents while investigating variety-seeking in restaurant choice. Among the significant drivers of variety-seeking intentions were overall boredom and boredom with atmospheric attributes.⁶

The definition of variety seeking in that study is especially useful. Leaving your last restaurant does not necessarily mean hunting for somewhere completely unknown. It can mean switching to another restaurant you already know.

In other words, somebody can have several “usual places.” Maybe Monday lunch is Restaurant A. Friday dinner is Restaurant B. Family night is Restaurant C.

Restaurant loyalty may be less like marriage and more like a small portfolio.

Researchers have actually measured diners becoming satiated with repeat visits

A second study went directly after the repetition problem.

Researchers examined 493 customers of casual and upscale restaurants in the United States. They wanted to know whether repeated restaurant visits produced satiation, meaning that the experience became less enjoyable through repetition.

Satiation increased as revisit frequency increased over the two- and six-week periods they studied. The pattern was not identical everywhere either: customers of upscale restaurants showed faster satiation than casual-dining customers when revisiting more frequently.⁷

If I eat at the same neighbourhood noodle shop twice in one week, repetition might not bother me very much. I may actually want consistency. If I spend RM250 on a special dinner and return three days later for exactly the same experience, novelty may matter more.

The study does not establish a universal ideal revisit frequency. It does show why “get customers to return as often as possible” is psychologically less simple than it sounds.

Klang Valley diners give us the other half of the story

The desire for something new is not merely an American restaurant phenomenon.

Another study surveyed customers at shopping malls in the Klang Valley and used 588 responses in its analysis. The researchers separated variety seeking into intrinsic and extrinsic motivations.

Intrinsic variety seeking can come from inside the customer: repetition has become boring and the person wants stimulation or change. Extrinsic variety seeking can be triggered by something outside the person, such as a new option or changes in the environment.

Both forms of variety-seeking motivation played a role in how respondents evaluated new restaurants. Satisfaction with the new restaurant was then connected with revisit intention, word of mouth and attachment.⁸

There is something slightly funny about this. A customer gets bored, tries somewhere new, and if the new restaurant succeeds, it starts trying to turn that customer into a regular.

The novel restaurant wants to become familiar. The familiar restaurant wants to become interesting again.

The same person can want certainty and novelty at the same time

At first, familiarity and variety seeking sound like opposite behaviours. I think they are better understood as two needs that keep adjusting against one another.

Some evenings we want certainty. I am hungry. I am tired. I have forty-five minutes. Please do not make dinner another research project.

Other evenings we want discovery. I have nowhere to be. Someone sent me this place yesterday. Apparently they smoke the duck themselves. Let's go.

The interesting part is that a restaurant can offer both. A regular customer may want the same signature noodles but try a seasonal drink. A diner may choose the familiar neighbourhood restaurant because dinner itself needs to be predictable, then order a dish they have never tried.

People are not “familiarity customers” or “novelty customers” forever. Context moves them.

So what should a restaurant actually do with this?

The easy conclusion would be to write “five ways to build familiarity without becoming boring.” I don't think the evidence is strong enough for that.

None of these studies randomly assigned restaurants to change one dish every six weeks and discovered the perfect novelty schedule.

What the research gives us is a better question:

Those are not necessarily the same things.

A person may love that your signature chicken never changes while being bored by the rest of the menu. They may want the food to stay exactly as it is but wish the lunch specials changed more often. A customer may be bored with the restaurant atmosphere rather than the food; the variety-seeking study is particularly interesting because boredom with atmospheric attributes, not merely food, was associated with variety seeking.⁶

On the other side, changing something can destroy familiarity that was quietly doing a lot of work.

Imagine a family that has visited the same restaurant for years because the father always orders one claypot fish. The restaurant redesigns the menu. Claypot fish disappears. Most of the food is still there. Quality has not collapsed. Prices have barely changed.

But next Sunday, somebody asks the question the family has not needed to ask for years: “Then what is Dad going to eat?”

Now another restaurant can enter the conversation.

What the research does not prove

There is a temptation with psychology to find a study, give the effect a name and start explaining everybody. We should resist that.

The studies in this article come from different countries, restaurant types, years and methods. Some are surveys asking people to recall or rank decisions. Some examine intentions rather than observing an actual purchase. The unfamiliar-food study manipulated information in an experimental setting, but that does not mean every unfamiliar ingredient raises risk by the same amount. The Malaysian studies are especially useful because they involve local consumers, but neither sample represents every diner in Malaysia.

The 539-person Malaysian restaurant-choice study did not experimentally prove that familiarity causes repeat visits.² The 2024 meal-choice research tells us habitual meal strategies are common, but it does not tell us that habit dominates every restaurant decision.³ The satiation study found a relationship between repeated visits and satiation within its sample and periods, not a universal countdown after which customers become bored.⁷

And none of these papers tested my example about parking behind a pharmacy in Petaling Jaya.

That example is there because research becomes useful when we can recognise the behaviour it is describing, but recognising ourselves in a finding is not the same thing as proving why we behaved that way.

The defensible conclusion is narrower. Past experience and habitual choices are real parts of restaurant decision-making. Unfamiliarity can introduce both attraction and perceived risk. Repeated restaurant experiences can produce satiation and boredom, while variety seeking gives customers reasons to explore other options.

There is a restaurant people tell others is their favourite. Then there is the restaurant they actually ate at three times this month. They may be the same place. Often they are not.

Being someone's favourite sounds powerful. Being the restaurant that six hungry people can agree on at 7.30pm might be even more valuable.

You already know the food. You know what it costs. You know Dad will eat there. You know where to park. Nothing needs explaining.

Until one day it does. And once the group has to think about dinner again, the new restaurant finally gets its chance.