A Fancy Card Is Becoming the Only Way to Get a Restaurant Reservation
The cocktail is $21, and it is absolutely worth it. Or at least that is what I’ve heard about a certain gussied-up old-fashioned that keeps making the rounds on my Instagram. Rum is infused with rose petals, ginger, and a smattering of other Indian spices and then mixed with orange juice and whole milk. The dairy curdles and is strained out drip-by-drip until the final clarified liquid is as clear as glass—a recipe that took two months to develop and requires 36 hours of preparation. After all that, it’s served on top of an ice cube stamped with the name of the restaurant that sells it: Bungalow.
For weeks I’ve been trying and failing to get a reservation at the buzzy Lower Manhattan Indian restaurant. The problem is Resy. The reservation app never seems to have any open slots. New tables supposedly open up every day at 11 a.m. Eastern. Most days they are all taken within three minutes.
Such is the nature of restaurant reservations these days: It has never been easier to book a table, and it’s never been harder to actually find one. You can fire up apps such as Resy, Tock, SevenRooms, Yelp, and OpenTable and find plenty of openings at perfectly good, even great, restaurants. But getting a seat at the most sought-after spots, especially in major cities, has become hellish. In the days of phone reservations, tables might have been booked up weeks or months in advance at the most exclusive restaurants—but now the phenomenon plays out beyond just the Michelin-starred spots. Batches of new openings can disappear before you have the time to click and confirm—perhaps snatched up by bots or scalpers. One student at Brown has reportedly made $70,000 by hawking reservations between classes.
