There’s an early episode of the HBO series Sex and the City where Kim Cattrall’s character Samantha Jones finds herself a sudden social pariah, blacklisted from every hot restaurant in town after making an enemy of a powerful New York City socialite. Watching Sam fall into despair as doors are slammed in her face and she’s repeatedly rejected trying to make a dinner reservation, I realized the comedic situation seemed just a little too familiar for comfort.
Booking dinner reservations in New York City these days feels frustrating at best, and often even impossible. The process of planning a meal with friends now includes time spent commiserating about how difficult it is just to find a nice place to eat. As we obsessively scroll through apps and fruitlessly place ourselves on dozens of waitlists, it begs the question: have restaurant reservation apps turned all of us into social pariahs?
Purportedly created to simplify and democratize the process of booking restaurant tables, the current generation of reservation apps burst into New York’s dining scene in 2014 with the launch of Resy. Co-created by media entrepreneurs Ben Leventhal and Gary Vaynerchuk, Resy was conceived as a cooler, trendier mobile-based underdog intended to compete with the longtime desktop reservation stalwart OpenTable.
From the beginning, Resy had a different mission than OpenTable. The latter was primarily a service for restaurant owners with a business model based on subscription fees and a per-diner charge that prioritized putting as many diners in seats as possible. By contrast, Resy was more status and customer focused; designed to give avid diners access to exclusive and sought-after dining experiences, which it packages with shiny “best of” lists and magazine-style editorial content. Unlike OpenTable, Resy only charged restaurants a low flat fee, encouraging cost-conscious owners to make the switch in droves.
Without a per-person charge, Resy’s business model has always been less about seating a volume of customers than it is about attracting a particular kind of “desirable” high-end customer, as evidenced by its business decisions like the 2019 sale to American Express, which essentially bought the app as a VIP perk for its highest value credit card customers, to the way Resy eliminated its Android app in 2022, opting to focus only on the statically younger and wealthier iPhone users.
This model of exclusivity has unfortunately been emulated by Resy’s other newer competitors in the space like Tock, which requires nonrefundable deposits to book tables; SevenRooms, named after former Vanity Fair Editor-in-Chief Graydon Carters’ nauseatingly classist theory about the social rungs of society; and newcomer Dorsia, appallingly named after the fictional Patrick Bateman’s favorite restaurant in the ultimate dating red flag book and film, American Psycho.
A business prioritizing its preferred customers wouldn’t be an issue, save for the fact that what was once a mere convenient option folks could use if they wanted, has now become an increasingly unavoidable hurdle as businesses have moved toward using apps like Resy and the like as their only means of offering reservations.
Ironically, this widespread adoption owes a lot to the City’s Covid-19 pandemic-era restrictions like contact tracing and outdoor dining, when the apps’ built-in data collection features really did help owners and diners navigating those unprecedented times.
Yet, years later, as restrictions eased and things “opened up again,” many restaurants opted to continue using apps to maintain their booking systems due to the influence of predictability on their bottom lines. In an industry with razor-thin margins, knowing exactly how many customers you’ll serve days or weeks in advance means control over the most important of make-it-or-break-it business variables. This may seem like a win for the restaurant owners, but on the customer side, things get a little more complicated.
Last year, veteran restaurant critic Robert Sietsema called Resy his “frenemy,” a portmanteau of “friend” and “enemy,” praising the convenience, but expressing frustration with its inherent datafication, explaining that having to enter a credit card number to hold reservations has made dining out anonymously a thing of the past (an occupational hazard for a critic!). Trying to book a table for dinner with two friends, he realized the apps also actively discourage certain party sizes. Reservations for three, for example, are particularly rare on Resy because three diners require the same size table as four, while spending less money, so many restaurants have simply stopped offering the option.
Equally stymied by Resy are the staff reporters from The New York Times Food and Dining section, who created an entire interactive package about unsuccessfully trying to use the app to land a reservation at Greenwich Village hotspot, Semma, as well as the writers at Bon Appetit who declared restaurant reservation culture “out of control.”
If the savviest professionals in the dining industry are struggling to book tables, how can civilians hope to stand a chance? While Fast Company named Resy one of its 2023 “Brands that Matter” celebrating it for “helping diners find their new favorite restaurants” and making them “feel like insiders,” typing the word “Resy” into the Reddit search bar tells a different story, revealing a litany of complaints from frustrated diners sharing how the app has made booking restaurants harder than ever.
A recent New Yorker story suggested supply and demand motivated by social media influencers as well as the rise of AI bots and “table scalpers” (think: ticket scalpers but for reservations) as explanations for why things have devolved so badly, and while those are certainly contributing factors, I believe it’s less about the way the apps are being used than their existence in the first place.
While a touch of exclusivity has been a part of the NYC dining scene since it was established in the early 19th century, the use of restaurant reservation apps has introduced a unique third-party element to the process that had never been part of running a restaurant. Even in the days of greased palms and in-the-know concierges, the business of booking tables was controlled in house where managing reservations was just as much a part of running a restaurant as serving tables and washing dishes. By outsourcing this task to a third-party, restaurants have essentially allowed a separate autonomous business with its own financial priorities to serve as a middleman between the customer and the restaurant.
With a hilarious lack of self-awareness, it’s Resy’s own Leventhal who has stepped up to try to tackle the problem, telling The New York Times: “connectivity between restaurants and guests has eroded” due to the reliance on outside services like GrubHub and the lack of “direct reservation lines.” True, but take what he says with a grain of salt for his proposed solution is…you guessed it! Another app. This time a loyalty program called Blackbird unironically designed to reintroduce the very communication between restaurants and diners he was instrumental in destroying.
Ultimately as much as their marketing and messaging may claim they want to help connect restaurants with passionate diners or create access for everyone to find their favorite place to eat, at the end of the day, reservation apps like Resy are independent companies driven mainly by their own success. So far, it’s the customers that are feeling the frustration, but it’s inevitable that the restaurant owners will soon start to feel the squeeze. Because the unappetizing truth is that if we all continue to hand over control to companies like Resy in favor of convenience, we’ll always be serving—and dining—entirely at their pleasure.