Customers’ risk perception and dine-out motivation during a pandemic: Insight for the restaurant industry

•Proposed model for understanding customer decisions to dine out during a pandemic.•Explored conceptual and empirical literature and constructs of trust, transparency, motivation, and risk.•Applied optimism bias theory to forward a model of motivation based on affective decision framework.•Proposed model could provide insight to managers for marketing to a motivated customer during the pandemic. The restaurant industry is one of the most affected businesses during the outbreak of COVID-19. The customer choice regarding whether or not to dine in a restaurant have changed due to this unprecedented global pandemic. Integrated with the affective decision-making framework, meta-theoretic model of motivation (3M), and optimistic bias theory, this conceptual paper proposes a theoretical scheme for understanding constructs that affect consumer motivation while considering the significance of consumers’ risk perceptions of the novel coronavirus disease. This research aims to delineate the role of loyalty, trust, and transparency on resuming in-restaurant dining during and after the pandemic. By identifying the link between each construct and addressing the unparalleled food-/health related risks, this study suggests that restaurants who accumulated more customer trust by fostering transparency are likely to have more business and quickly recover from the shock.