Reservations 'R' Us. There's gold in them thar rezy hills.

Back in the day, when I dined out - with some frequency - at fancy restaurants, I don't remember ever having much of a problem getting a reservation. Maybe I wasn't going to any "it!" places. Maybe at the time, it just wasn't that big a deal. 

Using a phone - maybe even the your hotel room - you called, as we so quaintly did before there was Resy and Open Table, and made your reservation. And if they couldn't accommodate you at the time and place you wanted, you just moved on to the next place on your list. 

These days, when I do go out for dinner (lunch doesn't tend to be a problem) at a nice place (which isn't all that often), sometimes I can't get a reservation. Again, on to the next.

I am not, of course, doing much dining out in NYC.

Yes, Boston does have restaurants that people desperately want to go to. I'm just not one of those people. New restaurant? Meh. Michelin star? This is Boston: as if! But even if it were to come to pass that we got a Michelin star, I'd take a pass.

Now that I'm an old, I'm no longer as adventurous as I once was. If I'm dining out, it's typically at one of handful of old favorites. Guess I'm just one big dining yawn.

But in NYC, folks are a lot more committed to seeing and being seen than they are in Boston. People in general eat out more often than in other cities. And in general it's harder to score a reservation at a place that's hot, or just got a great review, or was awarded a star, or where the A-list folks committed to seeing and being seen have been spotted (and there are a disproportionate number of them in NYC). At such places, it can be nearly impossible to find a table. 

At some spots, when blocks of reservations are released, they're snapped up immediately. Some restaurants set aside a couple of tables for walk-ins, but if you're a nano-second too late, you may be informed that there's a three hour wait. (As if.)

The difficulty of getting a NYC restaurant reservation has given rise to a new entrepreneurial opportunity. 

To sidestep the reservation scrum, particularly at a hundred and fifty of the city’s buzziest restaurants, a new squad of businesses, tech impresarios, and digital legmen has sprung up, offering to help diners cut through the reservation red tape, for a price. In the new world order, desirable reservations are like currency; booking confirmations for 4 Charles Prime Rib, a clubby West Village steakhouse, have recently been spotted on Hinge and Tinder profiles. (Source: The New Yorker)

(Side note: at this point, The New Yorker article did a bit on the most exclusive NY restaurants by decade. The Sign of the Dove was their pick for the seventies. Well, during the seventies, my husband and I had an incredibly dreadful lunch there. Our table was the size of a dinner plate, or maybe, if I'm being generous, a charger. And all these decades later, I can still taste the vichyssoise, which we immediately renamed "cream of rock salt." We probably had a reservation, which we made by phone.)

Among the businesses spawned by the reservation "crisis" is something called Appointment Trader, "an online marketplace for people to buy and sell reservations." They're not just in the restaurant rez biz, they'll book shopping appointments and doctors' appointments. (Where were they when we needed them for vaccine appointments in 2021?) Anyway, people who want to make a little coin sign on to be sellers, and away they go. "Appointment Trader cleared almost six million dollars in reservations" last year, and the owner/founder rakes in a commission of 20-30 percent. 

One of the sellers is Alex Eisler, an applied math and computer science major at Brown, who:

Regularly uses fake phone numbers and e-mail addresses to make reservations. When he calls Polo Bar, he told me, “Sometimes they recognize my voice, so I have to do different accents. I have to act like a girl sometimes.” He switched into a bad falsetto: “I’m, like, ‘Hiiii, is it possible to book a reservation?’ I have a few Resy accounts that have female names.” His recent sales on Appointment Trader, where his screen name is GloriousSeed75, include a lunch table at Maison Close, which he sold for eight hundred and fifty-five dollars, and a reservation at Carbone, the Village red-sauce place frequented by the Rolex-and-Hermès crowd, which fetched a thousand and fifty dollars. Last year, he made seventy thousand dollars reselling reservations.

Which just about covers Brown tuition.

Another seller, who claims to have made $80K last year, said:

“It’s, like, some people play Candy Crush on their phone. I play ‘Dinner Reservations,’” he said. “It’s just a way to pass the time.” Last year, he made eighty thousand dollars reselling reservations.

Hmmm. Maybe I gotta get off doom-scrolling on Twitter, trying to figure out when the end of the world as we know it will occur, and start making some NYC dinner reservations. 

What am I waiting for? LFG!