By Eric Schell, Co-founder and CEO of OneTap. Former maintenance technician.
There's a version of this job nobody puts in a spending report. It's a Saturday night on Lower Broadway, a bar three-deep at the taps, and an ice machine that finally gives out at 10:45 PM because it's been running flat out since happy hour with no break. The owner isn't thinking about quarterly growth numbers in that moment. He's thinking about the line out the door and whether he's going to make it to close.
I spent years being the guy who got that call. So when Bank of America Institute put out a new report on restaurant spending, I didn't read it like an economist. I read it like a technician who knows exactly what these numbers turn into at 11 PM on a Friday.
Most of what's been written about this report repeats the same three headlines: Gen Z is spending more, independents are beating the chains, lower-income households are dining out again. All true. All already covered to death. None of it tells you what's actually about to change behind the kitchen door, especially if you're running a restaurant or bar in Nashville.
Here's what actually matters, and what nobody's connecting to the equipment that's about to take the hit.
Quick Takeaways Before You Read Further
- Bars are the fastest-growing restaurant category in the country right now, and bar equipment is some of the hardest-worked, least-maintained gear in any building.
- This isn't a seasonal bump. The report shows a structural shift of spending out of grocery budgets and into restaurants, meaning the volume is here to stay, not just here for a good weekend.
- Even national chains, with full facilities departments, aren't fully capturing this growth, which tells you the demand is arriving in unpredictable bursts, not steady, plannable increases. Bursty demand is exactly what breaks equipment that's already on borrowed time.
- Nashville sits right in the middle of all three trends: a tourism-driven bar and restaurant scene, a wave of independent openings, and traffic patterns built around weekends, events, and bachelorette parties rather than steady weekday flow.
1. Bars Are Winning the Recovery, and Nobody Maintains Bar Equipment Like They Maintain a Kitchen
Buried in this report is a stat that got a fraction of the attention it deserves: bar spending is up 9 to 12 percent over the past few months, outpacing every other restaurant category, including full-service dining and quick service.
Everybody talks about kitchens when they talk about restaurant maintenance. Walk-ins, ranges, fryers. Nobody talks about the ice machine, the glass washer, the draft system, or the walk-in keg cooler that's running behind the bar the entire time the kitchen is closed. I've walked into more bars than I can count where the owner could tell me exactly when their fryer was last serviced and had absolutely no idea when the ice machine had last been cleaned, let alone repaired.
On Broadway, in the Gulch, anywhere in this city where a bar is packed from 6 PM to 2 AM on a weekend, that equipment doesn't get the downtime a typical restaurant kitchen gets between lunch and dinner. It runs. And when bar spending grows faster than any other category, as this report shows, that equipment is the first thing absorbing the extra load with the least attention paid to it.
If you own a bar or a restaurant with a busy bar program in this city, the ice machine and the draft system deserve the same maintenance schedule as your walk-in. Right now, almost nobody gives them that.
2. Bars are growing faster than every other category, and Bank of America tells you to ignore that
This one is almost funny if you live here.
The report shows bar spending growing faster than every other restaurant category it tracks. Then it sets that finding aside, and reasonably so, because bars are a small slice of national restaurant spending and won't move the overall number.
National caveat. Nashville reality.
Bars aren't a rounding error in this city. Broadway, Midtown, East Nashville, the Gulch, Germantown. Bar and bar-forward revenue is a huge share of what this town actually does, and the fastest-growing category in the country is the category Nashville is built on.
Bar volume is also the most brutal load profile in food service, and it hits the equipment nobody budgets for:
- Ice machines. The single most under-specified piece of equipment in any busy bar. Sized for a normal Tuesday, asked to perform on a Saturday in June.
- Glasswashers. Run nonstop for six hours instead of cycling, and the failure shows up as a health inspection problem, not just a repair.
- Draft line coolers and under-counter reach-ins. Doors opening hundreds of times an hour in a hot room.
- HVAC. A packed bar in a Nashville August is the hardest thing you will ever ask of a rooftop unit. It is also the fastest way to lose a room full of people.
Losing ice on a Saturday night in this city isn't a maintenance issue. It's a closed bar.
3. Chains Aren't Fully Capturing This Growth, and That Tells You Something Important About How It's Arriving
This is the part of the report I think is genuinely underappreciated. Even national chains, the operators with dedicated facilities teams, negotiated vendor contracts, and real operational infrastructure, aren't fully capitalizing on this recovery. That's not a knock on their execution. It's a signal about how this demand is showing up: unevenly, in bursts, tied to events and weekends rather than a steady, predictable climb.
Nashville operators know this pattern better than almost anyone in the country. A slow Tuesday. A Wednesday night with a sold-out show at the Ryman two blocks over. A weekend with four bachelorette parties booked into the same three blocks of Broadway. That's not steady growth. That's spike demand, and spike demand is brutal on equipment that's already been quietly deteriorating.
A walk-in compressor that's been struggling for weeks can often coast through a slow month without anyone noticing. It cannot coast through a night where covers double because of a concert, a game, or a weekend of tourist traffic. The equipment that fails during your business's best nights isn't failing because of that night. It's failing because that night was the first real stress test it had seen in weeks, and nobody caught the warning signs before it happened under pressure.
What This Actually Means If You Run a Restaurant or Bar in Nashville
Put these three things together and the picture is clear. Nashville is a market built almost entirely around the two trends this report highlights: an independent-restaurant and bar scene competing hard for a piece of this growth, and traffic patterns that arrive in unpredictable bursts tied to tourism, events, and weekends rather than steady weekday flow.
That combination means the businesses most likely to benefit from this recovery are also the ones most exposed when their equipment can't handle the volume showing up at the door. No facilities department. No vendor on retainer. Just the owner's cell phone and whoever picks up first.
Growth is only good news if what's running your kitchen and your bar can actually handle it.
What To Do Before Your Equipment Tells You There's a Problem
You don't need a facilities department. You need to stop buying repairs in emergency mode. Three things, in order:
- Walk your refrigeration this week. Check condenser coils, door gaskets and temperature logs on every walk-in and reach-in. Coils and gaskets are the two cheapest fixes that prevent the two most expensive failures.
- Know your ice and HVAC capacity before your next peak. If your ice machine was sized for pre-2024 volume, you're already running behind on a busy weekend.
- Line up your repair partner before you need one. The worst time to negotiate a price and vet a technician is while your product is warming up.
That third one is what OneTap was built for. Instead of a three-to-four-week bottleneck of vendor calls and unclear pricing, you get a qualified, licensed technician and a transparent estimate in minutes. No guessing what an invoice covers. No scrambling because your guy is unavailable the night your cooler goes down.
Setting up a free OneTap account takes about fifteen minutes. Do it now, while things are running smoothly, and it's one less thing to think about when the volume this report describes shows up at your door.
Frequently Asked Questions
What did Bank of America's 2026 restaurant spending report find? Bank of America Institute's report, published 24 August 2026, found restaurant spending up 3.3% year over year in July 2026 with transactions up 1.1%, meaning the growth reflects more visits and not just higher prices. The recovery is being led by lower-income households and Gen Z consumers, and independent and regional restaurants are outgrowing large national chains.
Why does transaction growth matter more than spending growth for restaurant maintenance? Spending growth can come from price increases, which put no additional load on equipment. Transaction growth means more actual covers, which means more compressor cycles, more walk-in door openings, more fryer recovery cycles and more HVAC load. Transaction growth is what causes equipment failures.
How does increased restaurant traffic affect commercial kitchen equipment? Walk-in coolers run longer duty cycles, fryers and ranges lose the recovery time they used to get between services, ice machines fall behind demand, and HVAC systems work harder against more bodies and more kitchen heat. Equipment that coasted through slower years often fails on the first genuinely busy weekend.
Why are Nashville restaurants and bars especially exposed? Bar spending is the fastest-growing restaurant category in Bank of America's data. Nationally it's a small share of total spending, but bar and bar-forward revenue is a much larger share of Nashville's restaurant economy. That concentrates the risk in ice machines, glasswashers, draft coolers and HVAC, and Nashville summer heat makes rooftop HVAC failures especially costly.
What should an independent restaurant owner do to prepare? Inspect refrigeration coils, gaskets and temperature logs now, confirm your ice and HVAC capacity matches current volume rather than 2024 volume, and establish a repair relationship before a failure happens. Independent operators don't have a corporate facilities team, so having a vetted technician and transparent pricing lined up in advance is what replaces that infrastructure.
How fast can OneTap get a technician to a restaurant? OneTap connects restaurant operators with vetted, licensed independent technicians and provides a transparent estimate in minutes rather than the three to four weeks a typical vendor search takes. Creating an account is free and takes about fifteen minutes.