Thanksgiving 2025: OpenTable Reservations +13% YoY as Diners Skip Home Cooking

I spent Wednesday afternoon on the phone with a chef in Brooklyn who told me, half-laughing, that his Thanksgiving covers were up about a third over last year and he was out of turkey by 2 p.m. Then I looked at my own family’s group text — the one where my aunt has been arguing for three weeks about who’s bringing the green beans — and I thought: we are doing this the hard way. The contrarian thesis of Thanksgiving 2025 is not that Americans love their kitchens too much to give them up. It’s the opposite. Restaurants are the cheaper, easier alternative now, and the data is finally catching up to what diners already figured out.

OpenTable’s holiday read, reported by CNN on Wednesday, pegs Thanksgiving reservations across its 60,000-plus restaurant network up 13% year over year. That is a big number for a holiday that has historically been treated as the last redoubt of the home cook — the one day even people who never roast anything will roast something. (One caveat worth marking: this figure is single-sourced to OpenTable’s own platform data, which captures the segment of dining most likely to skew toward reservation-forward urban restaurants. Treat the magnitude as directional rather than load-bearing until a second platform confirms.)

The other half of the story is on the grocery side. The American Farm Bureau Federation’s 40th annual Thanksgiving Dinner Survey — fielded before the holiday, so freely citable today — reports that “a table of classic dishes for 10 people will cost $55.18, down 5% from last year.” That works out to $5.52 per person, and it is the third consecutive annual decline in AFBF’s basket. Turkey, dairy, and stuffing all came down. By the survey’s own math, the at-home meal is now meaningfully cheaper than it was in 2022 or 2023.

The math the kitchen never tells you

So why is the restaurant graph bending up at the same moment the grocery basket is bending down? Because the AFBF number is the part you can see. It is the receipt at checkout. It is not the four hours of brining, the broken oven thermostat, the extra hand towels, the bottle of wine you opened while peeling potatoes, the dishwasher run twice, the Tuesday grocery trip that turned into a Wednesday grocery trip because you forgot cream. A $55.18 sticker is a real number; a $55.18 experience is fiction.

Restaurants, meanwhile, have spent two years getting better at the holiday-prix-fixe muscle. A $75 to $95 per-person seating in a mid-tier urban restaurant is no longer obviously worse value than the home spread once you price in three hours of your Thursday, the dishes, and the marriage tax of arguing about gravy. The 13% lift OpenTable is reporting is what it looks like when a category quietly crosses from indulgence to default.

What the platforms are doing about it

The booking platforms know exactly what kind of demand this is. Thanksgiving is a near-perfect inventory problem: one date, fixed seats, high willingness to pay, almost zero substitution. It is the day OpenTable, Resy, and the global travel-booking layer most want to own end-to-end — reservation, deposit, no-show fee, pre-ordered menu, the lot. For a longer look at how that distribution layer is consolidating around OpenTable and Booking Holdings, see a forthcoming May piece on what their combined footprint means for independent restaurants.

The interpretation I keep coming back to: 2025 is the year the cultural script around Thanksgiving cooking finally decoupled from the economics. The AFBF number is the lowest it’s been in three years, and reservations still went up 13%. That tells you the home-cooked Thanksgiving was never really about saving money. It was about ritual, and obligation, and the unspoken assumption that someone — usually a woman in the family — would absorb the labor for free. Strip that labor subsidy out and the restaurant math is not close.

Mark this as the year the holiday quietly became a category for the hospitality industry to own. Next November, the question won’t be whether OpenTable’s number went up again. It’ll be whether the home-cook share has a floor at all.

— Hana edits the newsroom for TableTransfers. Tips: [email protected].