Restaurant reservations being outsourced to Resy, OpenTable, Tock
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The year 2022 saw restaurant lovers flocking back to their favorite places following locked-down 2020 and omicron-plagued 2021.
But it has never been a bigger pain in the posterior to go to any of them — be they old, new, or merely too arrogant for their own good.
With eatery owners howling to anyone still listening that they need every dime they can get after the pandemic, you’d think they’d go out of their way to let you in. Or at least to make it easy, right?
Ha! They’ve made it harder to book tables than ever before. I’m not just talking about certain places that exclude you just for kicks, such as Casa Cipriani, Casa Cruz and several dining rooms at Fifth Avenue’s new Aman hotel. They’re all “private” and off-limits — unless you’re a club member, or a hotel guest dropping $3,000 a night.
I mean normal-seeming restaurants that make reserving tougher than getting a yellow cab in the rain at rush hour. On OpenTable, Resy, Tock, SevenRooms and the restaurants’ own reservations portals, rush hour seems to be all the time.
Restaurants are blocking out just about any time a normal person wants to eat, even when plenty of seats are available. The strategy is to book masochist nobodies at 5 p.m. well in advance and hold prime spots until closer to the date.
No less an authority than Le Bernardin chef-owner Eric Ripert observed to the Wall Street Journal, “Sometimes on OpenTable and Resy, you don’t have the tables, but if you call the restaurant, very often you can find a way to be on the waiting list or to get a table.”
But what if they don’t have phones, or don’t bother to answer them? At Indian hot spot Dhamaka on Delancey Street, a cheery recording tells you to email. Sister restaurant Masalawala & Sons in Park Slope — Park Slope! — has eager eaters jumping through hoops just to get through the door. Many places don’t have phones at all. Others don’t answer them. “Just reserve online,” they say.
If only it were that easy. A swelling number of places require us to turn over our credit card data first — from brand-new Sake No Hana on the Bowery to the 95-year-old Russian Tea Room on West 57th Street.
Even modestly priced neighborhood bistros such as Quatorze on the Upper East Side now warn of a $50 no-show fee. Sure, no-shows are reprehensible — but it’s insulting to be put on notice at a place I’ve been to more than a dozen times.
There’s a credit card requirement plus a $100 no-show fee at L’Abeille on Greenwich Street, where Resy claims that no tables are available after 6:30 p.m. on Jan. 3. Forgive my skepticism, but I have a hard time believing the $195 prix-fixe menu restaurant is so booked during the slowest week of the year.
And then there are the technical glitches. The nice people at my favorite local Chinese spot, Dim Sum Shanghai, had no record of my recent booking. They apologized, blamed it on the “Google Assistant,” and suggested I simply call from now on, while cheerfully ushering me to a table. What a relief to discover, later on, that they actually answer their phone!
Resy, favored by hot spots like Rockefeller Center’s Le Rock, is particularly prone to going bananas. Last month, I reserved for two at 7 p.m. at Marcus Samuelsson’s new Hav & Mar. The confirmation came back as seven people at 5 p.m. — utter confusion. The staff’s response? So sorry, we goofed.
A Manhattan publicist friend used Resy to book a lunch table at Midtown Greek spot Anassa with a mutual friend of ours. She then received an incomprehensible notification asking her to “RSVP.” When she tried to find out what it meant, Resy responded, “You already have a reservation, do you want to cancel and continue booking?”
Grubhub, anyone?
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