Would you buy a reservation?
Mar 13, 2008 general food
Here’s a trend I’m hoping will never make it to the Midwest…
The New York times reported yesterday on a company called TableXchange that is a sort of eBay for restaurant reservations.
For $15-$40 you can buy a prime reservations in a number of top New York restaurants.
While I agree with restaurant owners saying it throws “a wrench into their carefully guarded reservation systems and lent to their culture of hospitality the odor of street corner ticket scalping,” reservations are notoriously difficult to obtain in New York and they probably should have seen this one coming.
The whole thing is painfully absurd to me and it’s pretty obvious TableXchange thinks this practice is a bit shifty as well as “the buyer and the seller of a TableXchange reservation are instructed not to change the name on the reservation and the buyer is told not to reveal to anyone at the restaurant how he or she got it.”
What I’m wondering is what happens when the same ticketing brokers that swoop up all the concert tickets to a big show begin calling restaurants strictly to obtain reservations in hopes of reselling them, and furthermore, will restaurants take matters into their own hands and start having diners bid on prime reservations directly?
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March 13th, 2008 at 11:50 am
Momofuku Ko, the new restaurant from uber-hot NYC chef David Chang, just put its online-only reservation system up this week and have already had to implement a policy to prevent scalping. You must present ID at the door that matches the name the credit-card under which the res was held.
March 13th, 2008 at 1:21 pm
good thing Ellie and I hit it when we did I guess…we just walked straight in and sat down.
Well…the original momofuku that is.
March 13th, 2008 at 1:42 pm
all i got is a ‘What the F*CK’. Are they serious. I’m a grown woman. I stopped the shifty ways once hit 21. I just want to eat…that’s all…just eat. Next thing you know you’ll have to give up your first born.
Reeks of Hannah Montana.
March 13th, 2008 at 3:09 pm
As Ian mentioned, restaurants are going to start requiring ID at the time of the reservation and then this idea goes right into the garbage.
March 13th, 2008 at 3:19 pm
But what if some of the restaurants like the idea and start just doing it themselves?
David Chang is a chef’s chef. He gets it, and he wants people that dig tasty food to be in his restaurant. He doesn’t want every pretentious asshole in New York to flood his gates.
There are a lot of restaurants that have a certain aura of pretension around them, however, and they would like the idea that it’s so difficult to get in that people are having to buy reservations.
It helped every place mentioned in the article, because it amounted to free press.
Either way though, it’s one of the strangest thing’s I’ve ever seen, but then I refused to even sit around and wait to get into the French Laundry.
Food shouldn’t be that difficult to obtain.
March 13th, 2008 at 4:52 pm
I don’t know, Bill. I think a restaurant that tried such a policy itself would get creamed by the NYC press.
Look what happened to the restaurant Fiamma. It got 3 stars from Frank Bruni. Soon after, it raised its prix-fixe prices. This week, Bruni wrote an article pointing out what the restaurant had done, and Fiamma turned right around and lowered its prices. (Though not to the original level.)
March 13th, 2008 at 5:40 pm
Hopefully we never find out. Even the service is ridiculous, and I see the top price went up as there is a Babbo reservation for $50 right now.