By 1999, a crop of new Web sites—RSVIP.com, Reservemytable.com, Foodline.com, OpenTable.com—were competing to automate the process. Tavern on the Green’s owner, Warner LeRoy, started taking reservations on the restaurant’s Web site. Other restaurateurs were skeptical. OpenTable charged restaurants a monthly fee, plus a dollar for every guest seated. Asked by a reporter what he thought about online reservations, the director of operations at Danny Meyer’s Union Square Cafe scoffed, “There is no substitute for a kind, human voice on the phone.’’ But Meyer became an early investor in OpenTable, and, later, in Resy. Last year, he invested in an A.I.-powered reservation platform called SevenRooms, which most people haven’t heard about because it’s been designed for diners not to know it exists.
To be clear: every night in New York, there are hundreds of perfectly good seven-thirty tables available at perfectly good restaurants. For a lot of diners, though, the pleasure is in the scarcity; and the smaller, noisier, and more crowded a restaurant is, the better. Some restaurateurs claim to hate the buzz that comes with being popular. Ariel Arce, who operates Roscioli, told me, “If it’s a room full of people who just flock there for a reservation, the vibe ain’t gonna be very fun.” Roni Mazumdar, who owns the 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 you are cordial to the staff.” He showed me an e-mail with the subject line “Urgent VVIP Request,” from a high-end concierge service that also brokers yacht sales (mission statement: “Dedicated to understanding everything you want and giving you more than you imagined”), demanding a five-top for an extremely powerful person, who “represents Matthew McConaughey, Scarlett Johansson, Chris Rock, Katherine Heigl and Tony Hawk.” Mazumdar’s team sent a reply saying that the client could try to reserve through Resy. (...)
In Bret Easton Ellis’s novel “American Psycho,” the sociopathic Wall Street protagonist is obsessed with a fictional restaurant called Dorsia—a place so exclusive as to be almost mythical. A new, members-only app by the same name promises to deliver what the status-mad bros in the novel cannot secure for themselves: a tough table. Aspiring users download the app and allow it to scan their contacts (“The fastest way to get in is with your network,” the site declares), and then answer a few questions: employer, job title, Instagram handle, LinkedIn URL. Dorsia is trying to figure out if you are the kind of person who will shell out.
If you pass muster (I only did, I think, because I had saved the numbers of a lot of chefs in my contacts while reporting this piece), you can log on to Dorsia and search for the solidly booked restaurant of your choice. (You enter your credit-card information immediately, of course.) The first reservation I spotted was an eight-o’clock Saturday two-top at Carbone; there was also a slew of prime-time tables at Le Gratin, one of Daniel Boulud’s offshoots. Then I read the fine print: the table at Carbone would cost me a thousand dollars—not as a booking fee but as a prepayment for the meal. For two of us to get our money’s worth, we’d have to down three plates of Calamari Marco, three orders of lobster ravioli, two veal Marsalas, a funghi trifolati, and two bottles of Barolo Gramolere.
Restaurants that utilize Dorsia see it as a way to collect data about their customers, and also to increase revenue by guaranteeing that those customers are big spenders. Other minimum prepayments listed on the app: two hundred and eighty-five dollars per person at Le Pavillon, Boulud’s midtown seafood palace; two hundred and thirty-five at Marea, on Central Park South; and three hundred at Torrisi (on a Monday), a sister restaurant to Carbone. This summer, as Dorsia’s members go on vacation, the app promises to be ready with tables at the chicest restaurants in Ibiza, in Mykonos, and along the French Riviera and the Amalfi Coast.
In promotional materials for restaurateurs considering listing their tables on the app, Dorsia claims that it saves twenty minutes per party (no waiting for the check) and so helps turn tables faster—a key to restaurant solvency. (Gabriel Stulman, of Sailor, which is not on Dorsia, told me that he needs to turn his tables three times a night to make money.) Still, several restaurateurs who have opted out told me that they find the colossal-prepay concept unseemly, in part because it encourages binge eating. “It’s psychotic,” one owner said. “We don’t want to put people in that situation.”
Dorsia understands that, like the N.S.A. and TikTok, successful restaurants know more about us than we want to imagine. How many times have you eaten there? Are you a friendly regular, an asshole neighbor, an expense-account out-of-towner? Do you prefer a cocktail or the house white? Do you linger after coffee? In the old days, much of that information—and your wife’s birthday, your secretary’s name—lived inside a maître d’s head. Many restaurants have always kept handwritten notes on their guests, relying on abbreviations: “H.S.M.” (heavyset man), “eagle” (bald guest), “o-o” (wears glasses), “l.o.l.” (little old lady). These days, guest notes are “data,” which tech platforms help restaurants keep track of. Oenophiles might be labelled “W.W.” (wine whale), or, simply, “drops coin.” If you got a surprise appetizer on the house, you might have been marked down with “S.F.N.” (something for nothing), or “N.P.R.” (nice people get rewards). Did you sit for hours over a bowl of soup, tip poorly, get wasted, or shush the young family sitting at the next table? You might be demoted to “P.N.G.” (persona non grata) or “D.N.S.” (do not serve) status.
Resy has a data-driven feature called Notify, which puts diners on a waiting list for a restaurant. (OpenTable and SevenRooms added similar features to compete.) Using it is a little like buying a fistful of lottery tickets. Diners add themselves to lots of restaurants’ Notify lists for a certain night with the hope of scoring just one. The moment a host decides that a table is a no-show, or if there’s a cancellation, a push notification—“New Table Alert”—is sent to everyone on the Notify list for that night. The table goes to whoever claims it first on the app. Curious, I added my name to the Notify list at every fully booked restaurant in my neighborhood, over a six-week period. I didn’t get a single e-mail or notification.
I thought I just had bad luck, until a conversation with Resy’s C.E.O., Pablo Rivero, clarified things. Over dinner at Txikito, a buzzy Basque restaurant in Chelsea, he explained that I would likely always be near the bottom of the Notify queue. After American Express acquired Resy, in 2019, anyone with a fancy Amex card—Centurion, Platinum, Reserve, or Aspire—has an advantage. If you have one of these cards (Centurion: ten-thousand-dollar initiation fee, five thousand dollars per year), Rivero said, “You will get a Resy notification before other people do.” (He also said, somewhat puzzlingly, “What we are trying to do is, honestly, democratize dining a bit more.”) (...)
At Polo Bar, Leventhal had talked a lot about the challenge that restaurants face in deciding who to let in the door: “We need restaurants to be democratic,” he said (a sentiment I heard over and over). “But they can’t be—in order for them to be sustainable. The margins are so thin, and there’s not enough room for everyone.” That’s why restaurants like to identify and reward V.I.P. and regular customers. If a restaurant deems you important enough—and decides to label you as a “V.I.P.,” “P.P.X.,” (personne particulièrement extraordinaire), “reg,” “$$$$” or “soi” (short for soigné) on its in-house system—you might notice a little gold-and-black crown emoji and more available tables next time you sign in to Resy.
“Good operators know the best practice is saying yes, but how do you say yes while maximizing revenue?” Leventhal said. “It’s about saying yes to the person who’s going to spend the most money over the long haul.”
by Adam Liscoe, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Ralph Lauren Polo Bar; Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
