It's reasonably likely that restaurants were in something of a bubble during 1999-2019 or so. I would expect a long term decline in middlebrow restaurants in particular, with segmentation into fast food (which remains highly profitable, particularly without dining rooms) and very upscale table-service places that can raise prices arbitrarily high if necessary and still have plenty of customers.
Casual table service dining will have to emulate fast food as much as possible to survive.
Yeah, people just can't afford to eat out the way they could in the 1990s-2000s anymore
