When pastry whiz Vinesh Johny’s ice cream parlour, LICK, opened in February last year in Bengaluru, long lines snaked across the block in Indiranagar. With queue managers, velvet ropes and hip-hop booming through speakers, the launch seemed more like the opening of a nightclub than an ice-cream store.
“Those lines gave me most of my grey hair,” jokes Johny. “The level of expectation that comes with waiting in line for 45 minutes for ice cream puts an unreal pressure on the team.”
Akhil Iyer, of the much-loved and viral Benne chain of restaurants, shares a similar sentiment. “Shriya (his wife and co-founder) and I were white with fear when we saw the long line outside our first outlet in Bandra (Mumbai). We had no idea how we would serve so many people quickly and efficiently. But when we started chatting with people in the queue, we realised most people were just happy to try out something new in the neighbourhood.”
Increasingly, restaurants across India’s metros are seeing diners happy to wait for the latest “it” food. For a country where cutting the line was standard practice and standing in queue was never normal behaviour, what’s changed? Why do we suddenly love standing in lines, and what does that wait actually get us?
Personally, I can’t justify spending 45 minutes queueing for a buzzy food thing, especially since my baby girl was born eight months ago. My standard operating procedure is to wait for the initial frenzy to die down, then visit. Only on rare occasions do I join out of sheer curiosity.
The more I’ve asked around, the more it seems the answer isn’t one thing but three: diners have gotten more discerning, the wait itself has become a kind of status symbol, and almost by accident, the line has turned into one of the few places left where strangers still talk to each other.
The first part, discernment, is coupled with the fact that dining out has become a national obsession, and diners have a greater appreciation, appetite and patience for what chefs and restaurateurs do.
Saloni Dukle, a self-confessed food lover, queue-r and brand strategist at Kulfi Collective, a creative studio based in Mumbai, says that for a generation that’s experienced so much of life virtually, standing in line offers Gen Z diners a chance to “go out and touch grass,” instead of choosing another screen as entertainment.
Having made several friends while queueing in Berlin, New York City and Mumbai, Dukle says most people assume Gen Z wants to stand in line purely for the spectacle of it, to capture it on social media. “Actually, we’re flooded with opinions on social media. Standing in line is a way to actually form an opinion on your own.”
Beyond the stamp of approval a queue creates, or a diner’s status signal in choosing something culturally relevant, the wait offers a rare chance at random socialisation. In the age of quick commerce, AI bots and home deliveries, the opportunity to interact with someone outside a tightly curated bubble—a local grocery store owner, a neighbourhood vegetable vendor—is increasingly rare.
Sneha Kapoor, founder and CEO of Plum Insights, a cultural and consumer intelligence consultancy, has spent a lot of time studying how Gen Z behaves as a consumer. “What’s interesting is that Gen Z’s willingness to queue isn’t necessarily at odds with instant gratification,” she says. “They have low tolerance for meaningless friction, but a surprisingly high tolerance for friction that creates cultural value. The wait signals that something is scarce, desirable and worth knowing about.”
Kapoor is right. Gen Z and India’s avid diners are more discerning than ever. My own Instagram DMs are constantly buzzing with friends, family and even strangers asking whether restaurants with the long lines and slick reels are actually worth the visit. The queue creates an image, generates curiosity and gets people through the door.
But a good product is what brings a customer back.
Nowhere is that more visible than at Pomodoro Pasta and Coffee Bar in Mumbai’s Bandra, where the wait has shrunk from 2 hours when it opened early last year to about an hour on a busy weekend now. “We wanted to be an all-day, 11am–11pm concept when we first opened, but quickly switched to opening only for lunch and dinner because operationally, we were running out of hand-rolled pasta and sauces,” says Nousheen Rajqotwala, co-founder.
Sister-restaurateurs Afshaa and Nousheen have expanded the space from a 25-seater to a 60-seater to accommodate demand, proof that the wait is a symptom of scarcity solving itself, not a marketing trick sustaining it.
Afshaa says they don’t take the time investment in queuing lightly: “We’re lucky to have that kind of trust from our community,” she says, adding that a couple of their regular solo diners even went on dates after meeting in line.
It tracks with what Melinda Blau and Karen L. Fingerman describe in their book Consequential Strangers: The Power of People Who Don’t Seem to Matter... But Really Do (2009), which examines the “weak ties” we build with people who move through our days without ever becoming close friends: the barista, the hairdresser, the regulars at the gym. These strangers, they argue, are “as vital to our well-being, growth, and day-to-day existence as family and close friends”, rooting us in the world, plugging us into something larger than ourselves.
I still won’t do the 45-minute wait for a food fad, but maybe it’s time to shift my mindset around it. Perhaps it isn’t just a performative obstacle between me and dinner. Perhaps it’s 45 minutes of a city talking to itself, in real life, minus the screens and filters. Now that’s a conversation I don’t mind being part of.
Smitha Menon (@smitha.men) is a food journalist and the host of the Big Food Energy podcast.