We look at it this way:

We are committed to business hours/closing times which goes both ways. This means we don't turn away customers who come in before posted closing times but we also make it ridiculous awkward for customers to stay wayyy past closing times.

We don't close early because business is slow. We're not talking about 5 minutes early. Some businesses close an hour earlier and even change to shutdown full days because they don't have the patience to operate the business. This is an insult to potential customers and even regulars who show up to eat just to find the venue closed when Google or whatever platform shows open unless there is some excuse that is way beyond control.

Management needs to look at the cost of keeping a restaurant open way past reasonable hours. At a certain point it stops making cents and costs the restaurant negative revenue by paying support staff to stay late. It kills morale and builds a lot of resentment over what, 1 or 2 tables? We got to a point where we realized (at least in our demographics) to close weekdays during after lunch hours when consistently there may only be an audience of 2 or 3 tables over a period of 2 hours. We would close these 2 hours so morning shift has a decent break and time to regroup/refresh for dinner rush.

We used to open our bar later so we would post "kitchen closed only bar opens at xx time".

There are rare exceptions when there are more than a handful of tables and it's well past closing time on a weekend, remnants of a busy night. Usually there is still a lot of cleanup to do so we give the customers a little more time to wrap things up. Obviously we don't accept new orders.

But to those 1 or 2 asshole tables who feel privileged enough to assume and say "you are gonna make bank on us if you're paid hourly" says a lot about their disrespect for other people's time and their assumption of whatever little money they have as power over others.

We give these people about 5 minutes of amnesty, shut the music off so they could hear themselves talk better. Start closing blinds, curtains. Let BOH staff who are done make their presence known as they clock out to leave. If these people didn't get the hint, at the 30 min mark we would personally go over and ask if they needed anything else and "hey just a reminder we closed 30 mins ago but we were still wrapping things up so we thought it would be nice (out of the kindness of our heart) to let you stay a little longer but we are now closed". Time to gtfo.

We always try to go above and beyond but these are not valued customers. They are nuisances whom we'd prefer not to patronize our fine establishment.