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By Adam Iscoe
Everyone wants to eat somewhere, and in New York City, that place is sometimes a restaurant. New York is a city with long hours, small kitchens, cramped apartments, and plenty of restaurants. There is, unlikely, an opportunity: a date, a late job, friends in town, New Year’s Eve, too tired to cook, in-laws, a layoff, a birthday, a breakup. But getting a decent dinner reservation here is a challenge. A well-rated Italian restaurant? You’d better have one. A gourmet burger? Good luck. The new French-Korean fried bird spot?Safely booked for months.
In New York, the community food stand doesn’t have much room left for neighbors. At Sailor, April Bloomfield, and Gabriel Stulman’s new Fort Greene location, reservations are made fourteen days in advance through SoHo, Aspen, and East Hampton citizens. , who likely saw the post on a listing, or scrolling through TikTok or Eater. Most diners log on to a stand’s online page to eat at 10:59 a. m. m. , two weeks before they need to go out to eat, and then they wait. Click and pray. Pete Wells, who gave Sailor a 3-star review in The Times, wrote that even though the bar and two stalls across the street are reserved for walk-ins, reservations “disappear within minutes of being offered. “”Locals are asked to wait 3 hours. Of Roscioli, an outpost of Rome’s famed downtown eating post, the Post wrote, “New Yorkers threaten their lives, begging, bribing and begging for a table at the Italian eating stand. “
Since the pandemic, complicated reservations have become even more complicated (one survey indicated that, during lockdown, other people missed restaurants more than their friends and family). To avoid the flood of reservations, especially at one hundred and fifty of the city’s busiest restaurants, a new group of companies, tech entrepreneurs and virtual legmens has emerged, helping consumers reduce reservation documents, for a safe price. In the new global order, desirable reserves are like money; Booking confirmations for four Charles Prime Ribs, a steakhouse from the West Village club, were recently spotted on Hinge and Tinder profiles.
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A certain type of fat cat has asked someone else (a secretary, a janitor, the butler) to make reservations. But for ordinary people, who book a table electronically except in the most exclusive restaurants: Le Pavillon in the 50s, the Four Seasons. in the ’60s, Sign of the Dove in the ’70s, Le Cirque in the ’80s, Per Se in the 2000s. Thousands, all it took was a phone.
“My whole career is what you’ve done,” Michael Cecchi-Azzolina, who worked as a maître d’ in the 1980s and 1990s, told me. Reservists were trained to answer the phone in 3 rings; they write the call in a journal, highlighting VIPs twice. “And you knew each and every visitor very well,” he says. If a normal or a celebrity showed up without reservation, Cecchi-Azzolina would let them in. “There’s a kind of chemistry in the restaurant world,” he says. “Someone cancels, someone is late, and you don’t run out of weeds anymore. ” One night, while jogging at the River Café in Brooklyn, a guy gave her six hundred dollars for a table. He said he could tell the price of the expenses just by touching the paper in his hand: the tens and twenty were worn, the loads were clean.
In 2024, many diners are also willing to pay six hundred dollars for a table, but they will most likely pay it to a stranger through an app.
Ben Leventhal, co-discoverer of the reservation site Resy, agreed to meet me for dinner in 2014 to educate me on the new landscape of restaurant reservations. He left Resy four years ago, after the company bought through American Express, and has since created a guest loyalty app called Blackbird, which doesn’t take reservations but rewards customers with the same restaurant loyalty issues. . He previously told me: “The average place to eat in New York is incredibly disadvantaged and they don’t even know it. It’s like bringing a knife to a gunfight. He suggested we meet at Ralph Lauren’s Polo Bar on East Fifty-Fifth Street, one of the most popular dining spots in the city. (He booked it. ) I discovered him, dressed in a blue suit and sitting at a table next to a fireplace in the equestrian-themed bar. (You also want a drink reservation; I watched a hostess in a camel hair coat gently push aside a well-dressed couple who didn’t seem used to being disappointed. ) Leventhal ordered a tequila and dove right in, “mapping the reservation. ” ecosystem,” as he called it, on a cocktail napkin.
Their list of imaginable approaches was: phone call, email, Instagram DM, user (“Before you leave a place, you can make some other reservation. It’s a wonderful way to get one. “), text someone that you know . (the maitre’d, a chef, even waiters and cooks), hotel concierges (some residential buildings – 432 Park Avenue, 15 Hudson Yards – have their own), elite credit card members (“Chase has tables, Amex has “tables”), club booking clubs like Dorsia, new apps (TableOne claims to publicly display all available reservations at the most in-demand restaurants, in real time) Array secondary markets (just like ticket resellers, internet sites like Appointment Marketplace and Appointment Trader will sell you a reservation, sometimes made through a robot, usually in someone else’s name), the restaurant’s online page and online reservation systems (OpenTable, Resy, Tock, Yelp). Leventhal described this last category as by far the most common way to reserve a table, as “the land of democracy, the land of the first come and served. ” He then smiled and said, “In theory. ” »
Nearby, a woman dressed in red drinking champagne; Across the room, a young woman crying. A passing manager identified Leventhal and asked him about the inked cocktail napkin. “Do you do math?” She asked.
“We have to figure out how the reserves work,” he said.
“It’s an art and a game of Tetris,” said the manager, a blonde woman in her 30s. “Other people like to say no. When we have to say no, it’s terrible. People say, “What if it was Leonardo DiCaprio? And I said, “What about you?”»
Downstairs in the dining room, the hostess, Nelly Moudime, warmly greets Leventhal and asks him where he needs to sit. When Resy started, the app touted bookings for about ten percent of an average visitor’s check. (The Times called it “the next step in the decentralization of New York’s hospitality. After the public outcry, Resy replaced his model: restaurants pay a small monthly fee; Diners do not pay for reservations. “But now we have a visitor who fundamentally believes it’s worth it. “everything,” Leventhal said with a frown. Not everything can be bought, which makes people’s heads explode. You can’t call the Polo Bar and ask, “How much will they charge you to get in?”
However, you can call the Polo Bar, wait fifty minutes, make a reservation, and then resell it online. (Before I met for dinner, Leventhal texted me a screenshot of a page from Dating, where a five-hour table at the Polo Bar presented for $400. )
Mudime, who was wearing shiny silver sequin pants, stopped by our table to chat. He said a woman recently called to make a last-minute reservation, saying her mother had just recovered from cancer and wanted to party at the Polo Bar. At 5 p. m. , three other young people sit at the table: no mom, no cancer. “We still take care of them,” he said. This is the new world we live in. And I think we possibly would have created this monster. “
On a recent Thursday morning, I stopped in Roscioli. Like many trendy restaurants, Roscioli offers tables for VIPs, investors, other chefs, and regulars. But most of them are picked up in Resy as soon as they are available. Amelia Giordano, Roscioli’s reservist, invited me to sit with her in the empty restaurant, with the walls covered in wine bottles, and watch her iPad screen as the tables filled up for fourteen days.
At 10 a. m. , exactly, someone booked a top four, for 5:45 p. m. As of 10:01 a. m. , there were seven reservations, adding two for birthdays. Names started flashing wildly on the screen. 10:03 a. m. : “All the last tables are booked,” Giordano said. 10:06 a. m. : Fully committed.
At least a handful of those reservations were made through other people who would never cross Roscioli’s threshold.
In May 2021, Jonas Frey, a thirty-three-year-old software engineer, was unable to get a reservation to renew his driver’s license at the Nevada DMV. So he created an online page to solve the problem. “, ‘How come you can’t afford a spot in line?’ she told me in July of that year, after getting a twenty-two thousand dollar discount on her landlord’s rent, running out of her credit cards. , and after spending two months up all night coding in underwear (“My wife just brought me Red Bull and pizza,” he said), Frey introduced Appointment Trader, an online marketplace position for other people to buy and sell reservations: personal grocery shopping. reports (the Hermès store in Paris), doctor’s appointments (a popular product in Miami and Beverly Hills), and tables at restaurants around the world.
The online site looks like an artifact from the early days of the internet: with its flashy banners and undeniable menus, it almost looks like a 1995 eBay. “We get a lot of complaints because it’s ugly,” Frey said, adding that it hasn’t been published. It probably wouldn’t hurt business. Appointment Trader has earned about $6 million in booking sales in the last twelve months, double what it was last year. New users create an account with their email address to buy or sell reservations; distributors compete to earn ‘Tradepoints’ and ‘Medals’, which allow them to load more bookings and thus earn more money. Frey charges a commission of twenty to thirty percent.
Potential customers browse a list of places to eat sorted by region. Frey designed a set of rules that determines popular maximum put options based on reservation requests; In New York, Four Charles, Tatiana (an Afro-Caribbean restaurant on Lincoln Cinput) and COQODAQ (Flatiron Korean Fried Chicken) recently topped the list. Users can click on a faulty Google Maps plugin or enter a restaurant’s name in the search bar. You can purchase a limited number of “Instant Reservations” (an indoor meal for up to four people on Friday night at Don Angie, a fine trattoria in the Village, for $225) or bid on a place to eat and a hour. your choice. Individual resellers (e. g. FlirtatiousCanvas69, ExpeditiousForkfour5) can then settle for the offer and satisfy it by any means necessary. The customer is informed of the call to give when they show up to claim the table. (This can lead to awkward moments in the host cabin, especially for couples on a date: men are forced to place calls from other women and search for phone numbers – the call and the purchased reservation number. )
The afternoon before I met Leventhal at the Polo Bar, I logged on to Appointment Trader, who told me he had made an “offer” of at least $355 for a two-top there. I started by providing a few hundred: “? The value of what you bring to the table is below average,” the site replied. Then I upped the offer to the quantity: “? Did we say heated? Now you have those mercenaries, robots, and scammers ???.
So, who are the traffickers, mercenaries, and scammers who supply Appointment Trader with top-notch desks?Some are other people who sit every morning with OpenTable or Resy on their laptops, racking up bookings under other names. Some are young people who borrow their parents’ black Amex cards, call the Amex Centurion Concierge, and book hard-to-find tables for card users. Others ask industry friends for favors, bribe butlers, or email reservists with made-up stories: a foodie visiting the city (“we were desperate to come and try their delicious lasagna!”), or posing as the Queen of Morocco or the sister of the King of Saudi Arabia. Chef Eric Ripert of Le Bernardin, widely regarded as one of the most productive restaurants in the world, told me that it’s not uncommon for recruits to yell at and even threaten their reservists.
Alex Eisler, a sophomore at Brown University who studies implemented math and computer science, regularly uses fake phone numbers and email addresses to make reservations. When he called the Polo Bar, he told me, “Sometimes they recognize my voice, so I have to do other accents. Sometimes I have to act like a child. He switched to a bad falsetto: “I say, ‘Hi, is it possible to book a reservation electronically?I have a few Resy accounts that have female names. ” His recent sales at Appointment Trader, where his pen name is GloriousSeed75, are accompanied by a lunch table at Maison Close, which he sold for $855, and a reservation at Carbone, the Village red sauce restaurant frequented by Rolex. -et-Hermès, sold for one thousand and fifty dollars. Last year he made $70,000 reselling reserves.
Another distributor, PerceivedWash44, told me that he makes reservations while watching TV. It’s located outdoors in the break room of the West Coast hotel where he works as a concierge. “It’s like other people are playing Candy Crush on their phones. “play ‘Dinner Reservations,'” he said. It’s just a way to pass the time. “Last year he made $80,000 reselling reserves. It’s smart at anticipating which places will have the highest demand and its profile on the site ranks it as having a “99% positive sales history. “” in its last two hundred transactions. He also notes that he made about two thousand reservations that never sold out, a nightmare for any owner of a place to eat.
Some dealers use bots, which are necessarily computers that press the refresh button faster than you do. Various bots can check the app, ten or even a hundred times per second, twenty-four hours a day, until one of them discovers all eight. 00:00 table at the Bangkok Supconsistent with the Club for which it was scheduled. Instead of using a keyboard or mouse, the robot programmatically executes the underlying code of the booking application. Some distributors subscribe to sites like Resy Sniconsistent ($50 a month), which uses traditional bots to get complicated bookings; some use open source code published on GitHub or write their own.
In addition to hotel concierges, restaurant workers (butlers, hosts, cooks) also sell tables at Appointment Trader, risking their jobs for quick cash. Frey explained, “Basically, practically, you’re greasing the palm, without even knowing the guy. “. »
The origin of the reservation of the place to eat is more confusing than the origin of the place to eat. As Rebecca L. Spang writes in “The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Food Culture,” in the eighteenth century, dining out in Paris or London meant going to a tavern where dinner was served at a communal table, until the food flowed. Outside: first come, first served. In the U. S. In the U. S. , reservations began to become less unusual after the turn of the century, when it became popular to dine out on special occasions: Christmas, New Year’s Eve, election night. Most of the time, wealthy men “booked” personal rooms. in restaurants to entertain your guests. (In New York, other people competed for the most elaborate private dinners: on one occasion, the center of a large table at Delmonico’s was removed and replaced with a water tank, for a centerpiece of 4 swans borrowed from Prospect Park. )
In the 20th century, the expansion of the middle class, the suburbs, and the appearance of restaurant reviews in newspapers made phone reservations the norm, until the internet replaced everything. At the end of the 90s, after the cinema, car rentals and hotels. and airlines that make advance reservations online, websites like Savvydiner. com that offer reservations for places to eat. Diners would click a button, prompting a Savvydiner worker to phone the place’s butler for lunch, who would scribble the call in his book, along with everyone else. that they were not yet hastening the end of an era.
In 1999, a number of new Internet sites (RSVIP. com, Reservemytable. com, Foodline. com, OpenTable. com) competed to automate the process. Tavern on the Green owner Warner LeRoy began accepting reservations on the restaurant’s website. Other restaurateurs were skeptical. OpenTable charged restaurants a monthly fee, plus a dollar for each guest seated. When asked via a reporter what he thought of online bookings, Danny Meyer’s Union Square Café operations manager scoffed, “There’s no substitute for a friendly, human voice on the phone. “But Meyer became an early investor in OpenTable and later Resy. Last year, it invested in an AI-based booking platform called SevenRooms, which most people haven’t heard of because it was designed to keep diners unaware of its existence.
To be clear: On any given night in New York, there are plenty of perfectly fancy tables at very fancy eating places. However, for many diners, the excitement lies in scarcity; and the smaller, louder and busier a place to eat is, the better. Some restaurateurs claim to hate the rumors that come with popularity. Ariel Arce, who operates Roscioli, told me, “If it’s a place full of other people flocking to make a reservation, it’s not going to be a very fun atmosphere. ” » Roni Mazumdar, owner of Unapologetic Foods Group (Semma, Dhamaka, Adda Indian Canteen), told me: “We only value one thing: those who care about us. How do we know you care about us? When you show up and are friendly to the staff. He showed me an email with the subject “Urgent VVIP Request,” from a high-end concierge service that also represents yacht sales agents (mission statement: “Dedicated to understanding everything you need and giving you more than you imagine ), is not easy. a very sensible five for an incredibly tough person, who “represents Matthew McConaughey, Scarlett Johansson, Chris Rock, Katherine Heigl and Tony Hawk. ” Mazumdar team sent a reaction saying that the visitor can simply verify the booking through Resy.
In 2022, Justin and Hailey Bieber were rejected through Carbone when they showed up without reservation. In February, Hailey and her entourage dined at the Four Charles, after a constant personal booker named Nicky DiMaggio reserved a table for them. DiMaggio, who charges between five hundred and a thousand dollars per reservation, owns a sanitation company with more than four0 garbage trucks. He got into the reservations game as a teenager, after his cousin was given a reservation at Rao’s, the unassailable crowd-pleasing eatery in East Harlem. He usually works with references. “My consumer list is, for example, the NBA, Megan Fox,” he told me. (DiMaggio also claims that he worked with representatives of Serena Williams, a son of the vice president of Italy, a manager at a Rolex store and many Goldman Sachs guys. ) DiMaggio, who is thirty-three years old, reserves tables on his own call (to protect his customers’ privacy, he says). Last year, he made more than a thousand reservations at the city’s hottest eating spots; He claims to have approached the owners and managers, who reserved tables for him. He actually used Appointment Trader, like everyone else.
In Bret Easton Ellis’ novel “American Psycho,” the sociopathic Wall Street protagonist is obsessed with a fictional eating stand called Dorsia, a stall so exclusive it’s almost mythical. A new members-only app of the same name promises to deliver What the Status-Crazy Brothers in the Novel Can’t Protect Themselves With: A Tough Table. Aspiring users download the app and let you scan their contacts (“The fastest way to access is through your network,” the site says), then answer a few questions: employer, task title, Instagram username, LinkedIn URL. Dorsia is looking to determine if you are the type of user who should shell out money.
If it’s successful (I think I only had it because I had recorded many chefs’ numbers in my contacts at the time of writing this article), you can log on to Dorsia and search for the dining place of your choice with solid reservations. Of course, enter your credit card details without delay. ) I saw the first reservation on a Saturday at 8 to 2 in Le Carbone; there were also plenty of prime-time tables at Le Gratin, a subsidiary of Daniel Boulud. Then I read the fine print: the table at Carbone would charge me a thousand dollars, not as a reservation, but as an advance payment for the meal. For the two of us To get our money’s worth, we would need 3 plates of Calamari Marco, 3 lobster ravioli, two beef Marsalas, a trifolati funghi, and two bottles of Barolo Gramolere.
Restaurants that use Dorsia see it as a way to gather insights about their consumers, but also to increase their profits by ensuring that consumers spend a lot. Other minimum advance payments indexed in the application: two hundred and eighty-five dollars constant with a user at the Pavillon, the seafood palace in the center of Boulud; two hundred thirty-five in Marea, on Central Park South; and 300 at Torrisi (on a Monday), a sister restaurant to Carbone. This summer, when Dorsia members go on vacation, the app promises to be available with tables in the most elegant restaurants in Ibiza, Mykonos, the French ones. Riviera and the Amalfi coast.
In a promotional plan for restaurant owners who register their tables on the app, Dorsia claims that this saves twenty minutes of organization (without waiting for the bill) and therefore allows tables to be changed more quickly, a key factor for the restaurant’s solvency. (Gabriel Stulman of Sailor, who isn’t in Dorsia, told me he had to spin his tables three times a night to make money. )However, several restaurateurs who have retired have told me that they find the colossal concept of pre-payment inappropriate, in part because it encourages binge eating. “He’s psychotic,” one owner said. We don’t need to put other people in that situation. “
Dorsia understands that, like the N. S. A. and TikTok, a success of restaurants that know more about us than we imagine. How many times have you eaten there? Are you a friendly regular, a jerk neighbor, a spendthrift outsider? Do you prefer a cocktail or the white space? Are you staying after coffee? Before, much of this information (along with his wife’s birthday and his secretary’s call) lived in the head of a maître d’. Many restaurants have kept handwritten notes about their visitors, according to the abbreviations: “H. S. M. ” (large man), “eagle” (bald guest), “o-o” (wears glasses), “l. o. l. ” (old lady). Today, visitor ratings are “data” that digital restaurant attendance platforms track. Oenophiles could be classified as “W. W. ” (wine whale), or, simply, “drop a coin. ” If you won a wonderful appetizer at home, you would have possibly won the “S. F. N. ” (something for nothing), or “N. P. R. » (It’s nice when other people get rewards. ) Did you sit for hours in front of a bowl of soup, leave a bad tip, get drunk, or silence the young circle of relatives at the next table? You may also be demoted to “P. N. G” (persona non grata) or “D. N. S” (non-serving) status.
Resy has a data-driven feature called Notify, which puts diners on a waiting list for a place to eat. (OpenTable and SevenRooms have uploaded similar features to compete. ) Using it is a bit like buying a handful of lottery tickets. Diners upload themselves to Notification Lists of many places to eat for a given night in hopes of scoring just one. As soon as a host decides that a table is not shown, or if it is cancelled, a push notification (“New Table Alert”) is sent. sent to each and every one on the Notification list for that night. The table will go to whoever claims it first in the application. Curious, I uploaded my call to the Notification list at each and every eating place in my neighborhood, over a six-week period. I haven’t gained any emails or notifications.
I thought I was out of luck, until a verbal exchange with Resy’s CEO, Pablo Rivero, cleared things up. Over dinner at Txikito, a lively Basque restaurant in Chelsea, he explained to me that he would probably be in the back of the Notify. tail. After American Express acquired Resy in 2019, anyone with a complicated Amex card (Centurion, Platinum, Reserve, or Aspire) has an advantage. If you have one of those cards (Centurion: $10,000 initiation fee, $5,000 a year), Rivero said, “You’ll get a notification from Resy before everyone else. (He also stated, somewhat confusingly, “What we’re looking for is, honestly, to democratize the place of eating a little more. “)
Some dining venues are sorting through their virtual waitlists themselves, without Amex’s help. These managers choose VIPs and regulars from their Notify queues. SevenRooms, Resy’s former competitor, has a tool that has largely automated this process: a set of rules. Choose diners who receive priority push notifications in case of overdue openings. Criteria include how you visit a place to eat, how many bills you have, how much wine and dessert you ordered, and how much the tip will be.
Joel Montaniel, CEO of SevenRooms, told me, “It’s the formula that automatically identifies and segments people, because we know that the human brain is limited and not all visitors will be properly captured and tagged (restaurateurs can also manually enter visitor ratings). ) SevenRooms analyzes guest invoices, tracks referrals, and monitors online visitor reviews. Frequent cancellations or no-shows may be required to provide a credit card deposit. In January, the percentage of Resy restaurants charging cancellation fees quadrupled from before the pandemic. Levels.
Restaurants also need to know more about their guests. Debby So, the CEO of OpenTable, told me, “It’s not just the user who booked. If there are 4 people, they need to know the 4. Customer profiles and visitor ratings. they are useful for deciding who to assign a table to and also where: Siberia or a cozy stall?(A new startup, Tablz, gives diners the option to pay anywhere from $5 to $100 to reserve their favorite tables at the location of their choice. )New York restaurants. )
At the Polo Bar, Leventhal had talked a lot about the challenge restaurants face in deciding who to let in: “We want places to eat to be democratic,” he said (a sentiment I’ve heard time and time again). “But they can’t be, in order for them to be sustainable. The margins are very narrow and there is rarely enough room for everyone. That’s why places to eat like to identify and praise V. I. P. customers. and recurring if a place to eat deems it important enough and does so. the decision to label it as “V. I. P. “, “P. P. X. “(particularly an ordinary person), “reg”, “$$$$” or “self” (short for clean) in your internal system: you would possibly win a small amount of gold. and black crown emoji and more tables available the next time you log in to Resy.
“Good traders know that the practice is to say yes, but how do you say yes by maximizing revenue?He said Leventhal. Se is about saying yes to the user that they are going to spend the maximum cash in the long run. “
Moudime, the maître d’ of the Polo Bar, agreed, up to a point. “The average count is good. But that’s not all,” he said. “There are big wine drinkers, but each and every one of them comes. “And every night? No. Does a celebrity come every night?No! A place to eat works at the expense of a user who comes regularly.
Your Resy, OpenTable, and SevenRooms profiles stay with you all over the city, like Uber reviews or chlamydia. If you’ve ordered a bottle of Mastroberardino Taurasi 1968 at Carbone, at dozens of Major Food Group’s partner restaurants – Dirty French, ZZ’s Club – you’ll possibly find out and care about yourself as a result.
Guest knowledge is shared among restaurants owned by other owners, but platforms like SevenRooms and Blackbird need to replace that. SevenRooms’ Montaniel envisions partnerships between restaurant teams to “make the world a personal club for everyone. “Leventhal’s solution at Blackbird is to praise diners with loyalty points, which can be redeemed for cocktails and appetizers anywhere for engaging dining. (Blackbird’s tagline: “Be a regular customer everywhere. “)The company, which uses blockchain technology, charges fees to attractive eating places and some member diners and publishes an internal newsletter called “The Supersonic. “
The preference for collecting information about diners is one of the reasons eating place owners hate resale sites. When you purchase an Appointment Trader reservation, you will have to make a fake call to the butler to claim your table. How does Polo Bar know? How to get him a loose Martini, or what his personal water tastes or food allergies might be, when you don’t even know his true calling? (In January, Four Charles emailed a restaurant suspected of handling reservations acquired by robots: “We’ll want a photo ID. “)
This type of protocol runs the risk of giving diners the impression of being in a T. S. A. control queue. Restaurants don’t like this either. “It’s bad for business,” Eric Ripert of Le Bernardin told me. “Every day, we spend hours looking for bots and fake bookings. Last week, we detected 8 fake bookings. Unusual email addresses and disconnected phone lines are fatal telltales; Reservists call or text to confirm. He continued, “If you have tables that don’t show up, the benefit of the night is done. So we can’t lose reserves!”
According to market research firm IBISWorld, over the past decade, U. S. restaurant profit margins have skyrocketed. UU. se have stagnated at around four percent. Gitnux, another research firm, said high-end restaurants would likely only generate 2 percent margins. Ripert laughed and said, “Customers don’t know that our margins are thin. They come here, have fun and leave very happy. Other restaurant owners have told me that they want their customers to understand that every minute in a restaurant is made or lost; Four out of five restaurants close within five years. “We’re constantly wasting money,” Jenn Saesue, of the ever-secretive Bangkok Supper Club, told me. “Basically, I have a small army,” dice. de his one hundred and twenty-eight employees. These other people are counting on us. “
When dealers offer online reservations, they’re betting that other people will buy them: $320 for a table on Monday at 4 p. m. in Via Carota (risky); four hundred and eighty dollars for a table at Semma’s on a Friday night (an almost safe bet). When reservations go unsold, it’s the restaurant that loses.
Jonas Frey of Appointment Trader told me that he penalizes scalpers when they have unsold listings by denying them access to the site. A nightmarish trader, he says, may simply be a “children’s script,” using an army of robots to “make a thousand reservations. “hoping to rise to fifty. “
Some trendy New York dining spots have stuck to old-school reservation protocol. At Eulalie’s in Tribeca, a woman answers the phone and writes her call into an e-booking reservation—no email or OpenTable. The most productive way to enter the Frog Club is to write to a secret email address. But it’s rare these days to find a trendy restaurant that doesn’t take reservations. Lucali, the thin-crust pizzeria in Brooklyn’s Carroll Gardens, is perhaps the most famous: Jay-Z once called the pies the most productive in Brooklyn. Mark Iacono, who runs the booth, told me, “It’s first-come, first-served. People start lining up at 2 p. m. Around 4 p. m. , there’s a line around the block to reserve tables for that night; The first position is at five o’clock. I stopped by on a cool March afternoon, at 2 p. m. m. , and discovered that there were a dozen more people waiting. At the front of the line, a corporate hashish executive named Ben Zachs said, “I’m first!” I arrived at 12:37 p. m. Today is my wife’s birthday and this is her favorite eating position.
In second place, a woman named Alex, who wore pink shoes and socks, and in third place, Tim Kimura, who wore an eye patch and a black shemagh. Gigi Principe, an aspiring actress who loves to cook, finished fifth. She said she hopes to one day be first in line at Lucali. “If it’s Saturday, it’s the footballer’s gold,” he said. The line grew. A guy named Baron Tremayne Caple, wearing a dirty pink hoodie, had run to Lucali after cleaning someone’s workplace that morning.
At 4:05 p. m. , the restaurant’s host, Alex Perez-Cuomo, came out and began writing names and numbers in a notebook. “Cash only! She screamed. “You’ve been given the table for an hour. I want you all to sit here. Inside, Iacono sat through the window, dressed in a white T-shirt, watching the queue. “It’s easier,” he said. And there’s one thing to the line, now it’s part of the experience. ” At forty past six there were one hundred and fifty cutlery, and at ten o’clock there were only a few tables left.
At five o’clock, the eating place filled with its first wave of customers, who were eagerly pondering what ingredients to order: mushrooms, sweet peppers, pepperoni. The guy with the eye patch, Kimura, wasn’t among them. Neither did Alex. or Gigi Principe. It turned out that they were all workers of the same surveillance company, called Same Ole Line Dudes. “I’ve been called here to wait at least a hundred times,” Kimura told me. The prevailing rate for an afternoon in line at Lucali is fifty-five dollars, a percentage of which goes to the company. Baron Tremayne Caple didn’t order pizza either. His table had been sold for one hundred and twenty dollars to a user named Robin, who had hired him on TaskRabbit. ♦
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