Do you want to get dinner on November 8?: How post-pandemic reservation culture impacts the NYC dining scene
Despite the seven glass windows evenly spaced between the dark wooden paneling, suggesting that there’s life inside, and despite the giant red sign advertising the restaurant above the door, and despite the fact that the door opens and the phone works and there’s staff in the restaurant, most travelers of the New York City streets would be mistaken if they thought Carbone wanted them to come inside.
You can enter, of course, but how long you stay depends on how fast your fingers can click “book” on their Resy, or what color your Amex card is. “We don’t take walk-ins,” a beautiful hostess will tell you, “you can try Lupa down the street,” and although she may sound nice she probably doesn’t care if you live or die, as long as you retreat back onto the grey concrete from whence you came.
So sure. Try Lupa across the street. If it’s a Friday, their Resy will tell you can eat at 5:00 or 9:30. On the corner, Sekai Omakase’s Resy tells you no availability all weekend. That Mexican restaurant on Bleecker, Kuxé, doesn’t have bookings until 9 p.m. Even the bar on the corner, The Red Lion, takes reservations on SpotHopper.
For avid New York City diners, it may feel like the days of dropping in to a good restaurant are gone. The post-pandemic food scene now takes planning, dramatically impacting where and when the city’s social life takes place. With more restaurants than ever using booking services like Resy or OpenTable, getting a table has become something like a competitive sport– with all the spoils going to those who can pay to play.
Justin Racine, a New York University student, is on a college budget, but his friend’s dad was more than willing to put his black Amex down to use to get a reservation at Carbone (just don’t tell Justin Bieber). “I needed a rich person to take me,” said Racine, who said the meal was delicious but he never would fight for a reservation to return. Bookings at Carbone, a social media darling, are released online at 10 a.m. 30 days in advance, and usually disappear within hours. The restaurant did not respond to a request for comment, but did send two automated reminders that reservations are only bookable through Resy.
So just how bad is this NYC reservation culture? For starters, searches for reservations are up 107% since 2021, and there was a 6,360% increase in searches for in-door dining, which can be attributed to a post-pandemic desire to return to restaurants.
New Yorkers are also eating earlier than ever– partly because only 9 percent of Manhattanites have returned to the office full-time and are going out for after-work meals, and partly because many restaurants are maintaining the truncated hours they adopted over the pandemic due to staff-shortages and customer demand.
Put simply: more demand + less working hours = increased competition for reservations.
It also doesn’t help that for many rich New Yorkers, the solution is throwing money at the problem. Restaurant workers in the Hamptons were offered rides in private jets, concert tickets, and envelopes full of cash just for a table– and one guest paid $90,000 to reserve his table all summer (not covering food and drinks). A tech startup named Front of House offers a digital subscription for restaurants like Dame or Emmett’s, where diners pay hundreds of dollars a year for weekly shots at a VIP reservation list. You could also go straight to a dealer, and buy a table from a finance bro’s reservation trading group, or a scalper on the black market.
“Yeah, I absolutely hate it,” says Robert Sietsema, whose entire job is dependent on securing restaurant reservations. As the senior food critic at Eater, he anonymously goes to restaurants multiple times a week– and he sees this period as the beginning of the end for foodism.
“People glamorize eating in restaurants and they want to go all the time, but they only go to the same ten restaurants, which creates this boom and bust cycle. They’re making reservations on Resy, and it just becomes like an obsession in itself– which makes eating out not spontaneous anymore,” he says.
For restaurants, this rise in reservation culture is a mixed bag. New York City’s hospitality and leisure sector was the most battered industry during the pandemic, and many restaurants are still struggling to find staffers after the pandemic.
And that’s not to mention the price. Resy and OpenTable, who did not respond to a request for comment, both charge restaurants premiums to use their services. Amidst the cost-of-living crisis and inflation, being able to list on one of these apps can be difficult for mom-and-pop shops or places not located in high-volume, touristy areas.
But for some of these restaurants, Resy and OpenTable allow them to more accurately gauge how many customers they can expect on a certain night, and shift their staffing schedules accordingly. Some of the higher-end places can require deposits for booking, which limits no-shows or late seatings.
Bea in Hell’s Kitchen accepts walk-ins and reservations on Yelp and Resy, and general manager Brian Connolly says it is definitely easier for scheduling staff and sending booking reminders. Yet he also misses the human interaction, and being able to get a read on customers’ personalities when they book on the phone. “It’s a weird, foreign thing for people in hospitality to do,” he says, “It’s nice when people call up or show up and you can have a conversation and get to know them.”
And others think pre-booking contributes to an all-too familiar problem in the NYC dining scene: elitism.
Unlike many New York City restaurants, Kaia Wine Bar on the Upper East Side has never taken reservations for parties less than five. Although owner Suzaan Hauptfleisch says they are busier than ever, she says she won’t change their policy because she wants diners to feel like they’re coming into her home.
“It is quite an irritating concept to me,” says Hauptfleish. “In my opinion, there’s too much scheduling in New York and not enough spontaneity– and to be very frank with you, I feel if you can never get reservations to a place, it puts you in a category of only disposable money, rich and white. That is not us.”
Hauptfleisch is not alone: many restaurant workers are beginning to speak out against a hostile hospitality industry, made only worse by the entitled. It’s hard to say how long this culture will last.
Unsurprisingly, the critic is a pessimist, and Sietsema predicts the imminent death of this dining era via a hallucinogenic drug that kills all hunger or the total collapse of the food system. But until then, he does have a trick for scoring a reservation.
“Even the most crowded restaurant in the world, if you show up when it opens, you will find a seat at the bar and you’ll find some way to get in or you can convince them to give you a table that they’re holding for someone far more important,” Sietsema says. “So I mean, get there early– bring drugs, take something, and sit there and entertain yourself.”
Unfortunately (at least for Sietsema), scientists haven’t yet invented an entertaining satiating hallucinogenic drug. So it looks like the trend of New Yorkers eating early is going to have to continue– and if you want to get a table, you’ll have to get there even earlier.
