Late Stage Capitalism means you can now make 80,000 in passive income reselling restaurant reservations

Since the pandemic, tough reservations have gotten even tougher. (One poll indicated that, during lockdown, people missed restaurants more than they missed their friends and family.) 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.

A certain kind of fat cat has always had someone else—a secretary, a concierge, the butler—make reservations. For regular people, though, booking a table at all but the most exclusive restaurants—Le Pavillon in the fifties, the Four Seasons in the sixties, Sign of the Dove in the seventies, Le Cirque in the eighties, Per Se in the two-thousands—required only a telephone.

“My whole career, that’s what you did,” Michael Cecchi-Azzolina, who worked as a maître d’ in the eighties and nineties, told me. Reservationists were trained to pick up the phone within three rings; they’d write the name in a log, underlining V.I.P.s twice. “And you damn well knew every customer,” he said. If a regular or a celebrity showed up without a reservation, Cecchi-Azzolina usually squeezed them in. “There’s some kind of alchemy in the restaurant world,” he said. “Somebody cancels, somebody’s late, and you’re out of the weeds.” One night, when he worked at the River Café, in Brooklyn, a man palmed him six hundred dollars for a table. He said he could tell the denomination of the bills by the feel of the paper in his hand: tens and twenties were worn, hundreds were crisp.

n 2024, plenty of diners are willing to part with six hundred bucks for a table, too, but they are likely paying it to a stranger, via an app.

Ben Leventhal, who co-founded the reservation site Resy, in 2014, agreed to meet me for dinner to fill me in on the new restaurant-booking landscape. He left Resy four years ago, after American Express bought the company, and he has since created a customer-loyalty app called Blackbird, which doesn’t make bookings but rewards customers with the restaurant equivalent of frequent-flyer points. Earlier, he’d told me, “The average diner in New York City is massively disadvantaged, and they don’t even know it. It’s as if they’re bringing a knife to a gunfight.” He’d suggested we meet at Ralph Lauren’s Polo Bar, on East Fifty-fifth Street—one of the most sought-after tables in town. (He booked it.) I found him, wearing a trim blue suit and sitting at a table by a fireplace in the equestrian-themed bar. (You also need a reservation to get a drink; I watched as a hostess in a camel-hair coat gently turned away a well-dressed couple who looked unaccustomed to being disappointed.) Leventhal ordered a tequila and jumped right in, “mapping the reservations ecosystem,” as he called it, on a cocktail napkin.

His list of possible approaches went like this: phone call, e-mail, Instagram D.M., in-person (“Before you leave a place, you could make another reservation. It’s a great way to get one”), texting someone you know (the maître d’, a chef, even servers and line cooks), hotel concierges (some residential buildings—432 Park Avenue, 15 Hudson Yards—have their own), élite credit-card partners (“Chase has tables, Amex has tables”), membership reservation clubs like Dorsia, new apps (TableOne claims to show every available publicly listed reservation at the most in-demand restaurants, in real time), secondary marketplaces (in the manner of ticket scalpers, Web sites like Cita Marketplace and Appointment Trader will sell you a reservation, often procured by a bot, usually made in someone else’s name), the restaurant’s Web site, and online-reservation systems (OpenTable, Resy, Tock, Yelp). Leventhal described this last category, by far the most common way to book a table, as “the land of democracy, the land of first come, first served.” Then he smirked and said, “In theory.”

Nearby, a woman in red sipped champagne; across the room, a young woman wept. A manager strolling by recognized Leventhal and asked about the inked-up cocktail napkin. “Are you doing math?” she asked.

“We’re trying to figure out how reservations work,” he said.

“It’s an art, and a game of Tetris,” the manager, a blond woman in her thirties, said. “Some people really get off on saying no. When we have to say no, it feels terrible. People say, ‘What if I was with Leonardo DiCaprio?’ And I’m, like, ‘Are you?’

Downstairs in the dining room, the maître d’, Nelly Moudime, greeted Leventhal warmly and asked him where he wanted to sit. When Resy started, the app sold reservations for about ten per cent of a diner’s average check. (The Times called it “the next step in the devolution of New York hospitality.”) After public outcry, Resy changed its model: restaurants pay a small monthly fee; diners don’t pay for reservations. “But we now have a customer who fundamentally believes there’s a price for everything,” Leventhal said, frowning. “Not everything should be purchasable—which makes people’s heads explode. You can’t call up Polo Bar and say, ‘How much will it cost to get in?’ ”

You can, however, call up Polo Bar, wait fifty minutes on hold, make a reservation, and then resell it online. (Before meeting me for dinner, Leventhal texted me a screenshot of a Cita page, where a five-o’clock table at Polo Bar was listed for four hundred dollars.)

Moudime, who wore shimmering silver-sequin pants, dropped by our table to chat. She said that a woman had recently called for a last-minute reservation, saying that her mother had just recovered from cancer and wanted to celebrate at Polo Bar. At 5:30 p.m., three young people showed up for the table: no mom, no cancer. “We still took care of them,” she said. “It’s the new world we live in. And, I think, maybe, we created that monster.”

On a recent Thursday morning, I stopped by Roscioli. Like many hot restaurants, Roscioli usually has tables for famous people, investors, other chefs, and regulars. But most are snapped up on Resy as soon as they become available. Amelia Giordano, Roscioli’s reservationist, invited me to sit with her in the empty restaurant, the walls lined with bottles of wine, and watch her iPad’s screen as the tables filled up for fourteen days hence.

very interesting.

i had no idea you could sell reservations. anyone try this?

I hate everything.

Oh shit I started posting this, got busy and forgot about it. I don’t even remember where it’s from. There’s another half article somewhere.

The New Yorker, which is paywalled

Oh really?

SCREW EM!