Reservations about reservations
RESTAURANTS • The Apps
Is the easiest restaurant booking in Manhattan right now… Torrisi?
Get the sparklers — FOUND NY turns a year old this week. And where better to kick off our second year than where we spent a good portion of our first: weighing the state of restaurant reservations. In early ’23, a spate of pay-for-play solutions like Dorsia and Appointment Trader were new on the scene, leading us to put forth the above provocation, but regarding Carbone. (The more things change…)
What’s the state of play in the spring of ’24? No better, and perhaps worse. Let’s take stock of the field.
Dorsia: Not much has changed in the past 12 months. The invite-only app still allows users to book a table by guaranteeing a minimum spend for the meal. A year ago, a table for two at Torrisi could be had for $500. Now, on this coming Friday night, a table for four in the dining room at 5:30p requires a prepaid guarantee of $300 per, or $1200 total. (Inflation!)
The verdict: “Fucking expensive,” a lawyer friend told FOUND after taking the Dorsia route into Torrisi last month. For those who must, Dorsia does offer access to some new hotspots like Coqodaq ($180 per), though others like Raf’s appear to have exited the service. But for most restaurants on the app, going to the restaurant website or calling for a reservation works fine, and requires no prepaid spend.
Appointment Trader/Cita: The DIY aesthetic of the Appointment Trader website hasn’t changed in the past year. And emails from the reservations marketplace have gotten more frantic (“Someone will pay you $330 for a San Sabino reservation!”). At Cita, a somewhat more polished reservation reseller, dinner reservations this week at Torrisi are listed for $337 and up.
The verdict: Don’t. In the year since we embarrassingly bluffed our way into Tatiana with a gray-market reservation bought off AT, we’ve heard repeated reports of restaurants turning away resold reservations. After all, this is someone else’s Resy reservation you’re buying. (Had a positive experience with AT or Cita? We’d love to hear about it.)
Gray-market reservation marketplaces exist in part because Resy and the other first-party reservation platforms haven’t managed (or bothered) to beat back the bots. Reading the tea leaves, it looks like the direction the reservation market is moving toward rewarding regulars with access to reservations never offered up to the general public. (Restaurants have held tables for VIPs forever; the trick, now, is to create a good algorithm for it.)
Restaurant loyalty platform Blackbird allows diners who have demonstrated a certain level of loyalty at specific restaurants to DM that restaurant for reservations. And Resy — which has long held tables for the exclusive booking of Platinum and Centurion cardholders — gives restaurants the ability to allocate tables on the app for designated VIPs. Plus, according to one trusted FOUND source, Resy lately has been playing with gating certain restaurant bookings for regulars only (as determined by Resy, and denoted with a golden crown) in its battle against bots. We’ll see.
As for what else one can do? We’ve previously discussed hitting up last year’s hottest restaurants or giving in to booking reservations at the (fucking) bar. Given the splintering of reservation options, check not just Resy, but the restaurant website, too, as inventory varies by source. Maybe even give them a call. But also, take heart. One friend of FOUND got a same-day two-top at Tatiana last week the old-fashioned way: via Resy Notify. –Lockhart Steele