A reservation ‘for the fucking bar’?

RESTAURANTS & BARS • FOUND Adjudications

Just about the only bad seats in the (undeniably cool) back room of Double Chicken Please on the Lower East Side are a short line of stools under a bar shelf facing the room’s front wall. Walking in one July night, this is where I found myself contemplating the state of bar reservations in New York City. 

For the uninitiated, DCP was recently crowned the No. 1 bar in North America by 50 Best. It functions as two separate bar experiences: a front room serving batched cocktails and the back room, where they mix food-themed bespoke cocktails such as French Toast and Key Lime Pie. The front is walk-in only, and the back is half reservations, half walk-ins, with wait times stretching up to five hours. (The extremely excellent chicken sandwiches, which are larger and more delicious than I expected, are available in both rooms.)

On this lazy summer weekday, I’d arrived at 530p and managed to snag the last bar stool in the back room without a wait. But the complicated door policy brought to mind my previous musings about reservation apps, and an email we’d recently received from a FOUND subscriber: 

Subject: Bar seats on Resy

I need Found to adjudicate this: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT81mmquT/

In this TikTok, a woman, who was denied a walk-in martini at an unnamed restaurant, rails against a world in which one needs a reservation “for the bar, for the fucking bar.” As the world turns, cocktail writer Robert Simonson recently weighed in on the topic of bar reservations, correlating their rise (mostly in cocktail bars) to the pandemic era of NYC drinking, and bemoaning the way hosts often ask for a phone number even when bar seats are available — all in the name of guest management. Clearly that TikTok woman is not the only one deeply frustrated by the current state of play. 

But really, what are the alternatives? Well, dive bars, for one. Or, at a fancy cocktail bar, long lines outside and/or crowds inside. Back at DCP, I paid the tab and gave up my wall-facing stool, making room for the next person waiting for a seat, any seat, at North America’s best bar. It was just past 6p, and the front room was now jammed with walk-ins, and I thought, you know what? Maybe bar reservations are good. –Lockhart Steele

→ Double Chicken Please (Lower East Side), 115 Allen St., Resy (released six days in advance at midnight)