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.