Let’s play Reservation
Think of it as a game of chance or maybe the ultimate form of oneupsmanship. The prize? Hard-to-get reservations at the hottest restaurants in town. To help play the latest version of this game, a growing series of apps and websites now allow diners to eschew the old rules of dining, in which you call the restaurant for a reservation, or just walk in unannounced and hope for the best.
If you’re lucky, you can make a reservation with the push of a button, thanks to well-established companies such as San Francisco-based OpenTable, which was founded in 1998 and now seats about 20 million diners at 38,000 restaurants worldwide every month. But highly desirable tables and the demand for all things digital continue to inspire new services, some of which focus primarily on consumers and others that sell reservation and managements systems to restaurants.
For corporate diners and business travelers the answer may be Table8, a San Francisco-based app and website that was founded in 2013. Members, who pay $95 a year, have access to last-minute,
set-aside tables at peak times and access (or discounts) to Table8’s list of culinary events. (Nonmembers can make reservations at “generally available” times for free.)
For some diners, there’s a certain cachet associated with that sort of access. “When they take their clients into Bestia [a downtown L.A. favorite where reservations are always hard to come by] or another great restaurant ... they seem to be connected,” says Table8 cofounder and former Twitter executive Santosh Jayaram.
Table8, he says, is in 13 cities, including Los Angeles, and plans to be in 16 by the end of the year. “We currently have over 1,500 restaurants that we recommend across
the U.S.,” a spokesperson explains, “and we partner with over 200 of these restaurants to provide last-minute reservations, tickets to dining events and other Dining Club perks.” (In Los Angeles recently, you could make Table8 reservations at, among others, the popular restaurants Alimento, Cassia and Republique.)
Diners can make reservations using the Resy app, which is based in New York and was launched in 2014. Ben Leventhal, a co-founder of both Resy and the food-news site Eater, says Resy provides “the technology for restaurants to sell tickets and charge cancellation fees when they so desire” and charges restaurants a monthly fee. “More than 500 restaurants around the country have replaced OpenTable, or another system, with Resy,” Leventhal adds, noting that in Los Angeles that includes Animal, n/naka and Gjelina, three restaurants with notoriously long waiting times for reservations.
Booking for free
Reserve, launched in 2014 and headquartered in New York, lets you make free reservations at more than 700 restaurants nationwide on the Reserve app or at Reserve.com — or the websites of partnering restaurants. (The list of Los Angeles restaurants includes Rustic Canyon, Lucques, Wolf and smoke.oil.salt.) The company recently launched Reserve for Restaurants, a table management system, which “competes directly with OpenTable,” according to a company spokesman.
Both companies charge restaurants a monthly fee for access; OpenTable also charges a fee per diner, a source of unhappiness among many restaurateurs.
Velocity, founded in London in 2014, has positioned its app for a high-roller market. Users can make reservations for free; restaurants, in turn, pay a small transaction fee per booking. At some restaurants, you can use the “VPay” feature, which will automatically charge a credit card on file, allowing you to forgo waiting for the check. Velocity partners with more than 1,100 restaurants in five cities, including Los Angeles and London, and the company hopes to expand to about 30 more in the next three years.
San Francisco-based Yelp
got into the reservations business when it acquired SeatMe in 2013, and today you can make reservations at about 4,000 restaurants nationwide. The reservations are free, but participating restaurants pay a fee.
Lee Maen, one of the founding partners of the Innovative Dining Group — which includes the L.A.-area restaurants Roku, Sushi Roku, Katana, Robata Bar and Boa Steakhouse — says his organization uses Table8 and Velocity, among other services. “We use OpenTable,” he says. “We have no choice. The masses love [it].” But he adds: “There are a lot of start-up [apps] and a lot of people hitting us up. We pick the ones we think have a good idea and will act as a testing platform for them.”
Ticket to dine
Of course, just because you have a reservation doesn’t mean you’ll show. Some restaurants now require a credit-card number and will charge a fee if you cancel. Others, including chef Curtis Stone’s Maude and Trois Mec, the lauded restaurant from chefs Ludo Lefebvre, Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo, have embraced the concept of ticketed reservations, which helps restaurants ease the pain of no-shows.
Last year, Stone’s tiny Beverly Hills restaurant switched to an online ticketing system called Tock, which requires that diners be on standby at 10 a.m. on the first of every month when tickets for the following month go on sale. At Trois Mec, which also uses Tock, tickets go on sale every other Friday at 10 a.m.
On the other hand, if this rush of apps and sites leaves you with a feeling of dizziness or unease, you can always pick up the phone, assuming someone will answer, or just show up. You might get lucky.