Does anybody remember when dinner was easy?
Surely there was a distant era in which the desire to eat someplace didn't guarantee that a thousand people like you also wanted to eat there at the same time; when a Wednesday-night meal didn't require planning twelve Wednesdays in advance; even when dinner was a mere question of sustenance on the way to a film or concert or other cultural event of the evening. For a long time now, food culture has been culture. And, for almost as long, that culture has been oversubscribed.
So, let's begin by conceding there's a problem here that might need addressing. Not that the quickly expanding army of would-be disrupters of the reservations game is exactly waiting around for an invitation. The names trip off the tongue and clutter the App Store: Reserve, Resy, Killer Rezzy, SeatMe—all lined up to take on OpenTable, that behemoth purveyor of 5:30 and 10:30 seatings. One stands out as potentially revolutionizing not only how you get your table, but the nature of hospitality itself. The software system Tock is the creation of Nick Kokonas, the business partner of Chicago chef Grant Achatz, and its mission is to turn restaurant reservations into prepaid tickets, just like you would buy for a sporting event or a concert.
For a man who wants to blow things up, Kokonas is a likable guy. The 47-year-old native of the Chicago suburbs is friendly, open, and clearly the smartest guy in most rooms. He anticipates your every objection and is cheerfully ready to talk for as many hours as it will take for you to see the light. He was a derivatives trader before partnering, a decade ago, with Achatz to open Alinea, often mentioned as the best restaurant in America. But tidy as it would be to see Kokonas as the calculating businessman crashing the dining world, the narrative doesn't really hold. "People think, Oh, he's the guy who wrote a big check and I'm the creative one," says Achatz. "That's not true. He's an über-creative person in a lot of ways." Kokonas, the chef says, is frequently the voice in the company arguing against raising prices, or for features that enhance the diner's experience but detract from the bottom line. And to be sure, derivatives traders who leave the business to follow their passion for avant-garde restaurants are vastly preferable to those who, say, stay derivatives traders.
Still, Kokonas brought to his new career an outsider's penchant for questioning how things are done and a disrupter's refusal to take "because that's how it's always been" as an answer. From the beginning, the world of reservations was his special frustration. "If you think about how you book most restaurants now, it's like throwing darts at a dart board," Kokonas says. "You're asked a question: What time do you want to go? I want to go Saturday at 7 p.m. Well, we don't have anything within two hours of that time. Guess again. They're just simply trying to sell you the shoulder times"—the earliest and latest reservations. "So they're lying to you. And you're lying to them by saying you'll actually show up."
That is the crux of Kokonas's pitch, that Tock solves the problem that has plagued restaurants since time immemorial: no-shows.
This, remember, is a business in which owners can tell you the price of each piece of stemware, where the $1 that OpenTable charges per reservation makes a major difference, where profits measured in low-single-digit percentages are considered pretty healthy. And where the fewer than 10 percent of people who don't show up for reservations constitute a significant enough burden as to justify changing the rules for the rest of us.
The math can be startling. At a restaurant like Alinea, a mere table of two no-showing each night can add up to a quarter of a million dollars a year. By selling tickets, Kokonas figured, you would eliminate the problem, plus increase effciency in every other way, since each night's service would become so much more predictable. By automating the process, you could concentrate your (smaller) reservations staff on interacting with customers who were coming—keeping track of their preferences, reaching out to confirm, etc.—rather than spending all their time saying no to those who weren't. He saw his chance in 2011, when he and Achatz opened Next, a restaurant whose entire concept and menu change several times per year. Alinea, along with the pair's cocktail bar, The Aviary, adopted Next's ticketing system a year later. Last fall a former Google engineer, Brian Fitzpatrick, jumped aboard as a partner in the newly launched version of Tock, along with such investors as chefs Thomas Keller and Ming Tsai and the owners of the huge Chicago restaurant group Lettuce Entertain You.
In an exhaustive and exhausting blog post last year, hung heavy with illustrations and charts, Kokonas wrote that no-shows at Alinea were down to just slightly over 1 percent since the company shifted to tickets. At Next, the count of full no-shows—rather than, say, only two diners showing up despite a reservation for four—was a mere five for the entire year.
Both restaurants are of the type for which tickets make the most obvious sense—highly experiential, theatrical, offering an almost identical culinary journey to a relatively small number of diners each night. But Kokonas has a broader vision, in which Tock is employed by all manner of restaurants. The Aviary uses the same software, only prospective guests are asked to put down a deposit, rather than the entire price of a meal. The deposit—from $20 to $40, depending on the day and time—is then applied in full to the final check. Kokonas claims that the simple act of putting down a deposit—what economists refer to as a "sunk cost"—virtually eliminates no-shows on its own.
Kokonas is hardly alone in looking at the state of restaurants and seeing a numbers game. Resy, for instance, is the creation of Eater co-founder Ben Leventhal and tech entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk. I should begin by reporting that, when I signed up for the service, my profile picture automatically, inexplicably, appeared as a head shot of noted New York Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez. This seemed so improbable, so downright crazy and borderline sociopathic, that I actually asked somebody to confirm that I wasn't hallucinating. Surely no corporation poised to scalp reservations would intentionally invoke a man who, aside from being the very symbol of smarmy, entitled, overpriced New York arrogance, is reported to bring his own food to restaurants.
In time, I came to see A-Rod as just one of several Worst Things About New York that Resy seems to have embraced as its brand, none more than the shallow, grasping obsession with snagging a seat at the hot place. The flavor is nicely captured in a recent tweet from Leventhal: "Oh, look. We're about to put some @CosmeNYC tables up on @Resy. Or you could wait until 2016. #xoxoresy." Or in the opt-out link for the app's "Priority Access" push notifications: "No thanks. I like eating at 6 or 10:30." This is how lords on the ramparts taunt the peasants massed below.
To be fair, the whole scalping category runs, to one degree or another, on the same strain of feverish FOMO. Reserve, which just received a $15 million investment boost from the founders of Uber and Foursquare, along with a passel of celebrities including Jon Favreau, Jared Leto, and Will.i.am, leads its pitch with the fact that you can pay your bill, Uber-like, directly through the app. But Reserve also offers the ability to bid for especially diffcult seats by promising to pay a certain percentage over the menu price on the whole meal. (A recent search suggested that the only New York restaurants currently taking advantage of that option were those of Mario Carbone and Rich Torrisi's Major Food Group, which already abides by the Las Vegas-proven principle that the chance to spend lavishly can act as a flavor enhancer. Reserve's suggested premium of 30 percent at Carbone would raise the price of its famous veal parmigiana to $83.) Meanwhile, Killer Rezzy, an app currently in beta, sells reservations at a small number of New York restaurants for an average of $25.
Tock, too, works on a "dynamic" pricing model, wherein tickets at more in-demand times cost more than ones at dead hours. The meal at Alinea that costs $210 per person (before service and wine) at 5 p.m. might be $295 per person at 8:30 p.m.
Not every restaurateur sees such services as being in his best interest, despite the promise of a share of the revenue. "We've spent our entire careers trying to dispel this idea that we're holding back tables and there's a secret conspiracy controlling why you can't get in. And now you're asking me to turn around and confirm that we're a bunch of shysters and criminals?" says David Rosoff, a veteran Los Angeles front-of-house manager. "The fallout is your place is filled between seven thirty and nine with people who can afford to pay extra, and you've alienated all the regulars, all the locals, all your core business. Two years later, when you're not as hot a ticket, they're not coming back. It's short-term thinking and it's going to be bad for our industry."
Surely there is money to be made by exploiting the worst end of the food revolution. But scalping seems like a good argument for the, perhaps naive, notion that just because there is a niche in the market doesn't mean it should be filled.
Of course, unlike, say, Uber, the true client for this new breed of reservations systems is the business, not the customer. As such, its evangelists show an exquisite, tender sensitivity to the trials and travails of restaurateurs. "They are putting restaurants back in control of their dining room," reads one testimonial on Reserve's website, as though it were a system for prison-riot suppression, something to stop diners from peeing on the walls. After a while, you begin to wonder how any restaurant has ever managed to stay open.
With all respect for the very real diffculty of the business, this runs diametrically counter to what it has felt like to actually eat out over the past decade, during which time the balance of power between restaurant and customer has swung dramatically kitchenward in nearly every area, from substitutions to reservations to comfortable seats. To be sure, this has contributed to an era of extraordinary eating. With the license to experiment and a willingly captive, paying audience, chefs have been able to go places, literally and metaphorically, of which they had never before dreamed. At the same time, it has often felt as though the giddiness of the revolution has been used as a onetime excuse to revise every aspect of the dining experience, all but exclusively to the benefit of the house. Worse, we, the dining public, have found ourselves in the odd position of being asked to be happy about it. Isn't it great to be part of the revolution? the server seems to be saying, as she lectures us on why the expectation of free bread is outdated.
I recently received an e-mail from the remote Swedish restaurant Fäviken Magasinet, happily announcing that it would now be closed twenty weeks out of the year, the better that its chefs could immerse themselves in meditations on such themes as "The colour blue in nature," "Lupin beans and the use of their proteins," "Monastery life in Finland," and "Traditional and modern methods for extended storage of eggs." This is strange and kind of wonderful, but it's not terribly...hospitable. As in, primarily interested in the care and feeding of guests. At what point, one wonders, does the word restaurant cease to apply? Fäviken, incidentally, switched to a prepaid ticket system this spring.
Likewise, it's hard to entirely share Achatz's excitement as he ticks off what can be bought with all the effciency and savings that selling tickets brings. "Maybe it's, like, working in collaboration with a designer. Maybe $12,000 of that is me and one of my chefs flying to Tokyo and getting inspired by what's happening there. Maybe hiring another research chef to develop extracts. Maybe we travel to Seattle and we go to Nathan Myhrvold's lab and we see a piece of equipment we've never seen before, and we're able to buy it, because it costs $22,000. It's really amazing when you start thinking about it."
I get it: The item of faith here is that all these groovy things the artist-chef gets to experience and buy eventually show up on the plate. And I am happy for those chefs. But agreeing to go out to dinner is different from agreeing to be a patron of the arts. And the fact remains that what Achatz is describing is made possible by a massive shift of the burden of risk from the restaurant to the customer. That's a big change, no matter how excitedly anyone insists that we're all in it together.
Always, though, it comes down to that one indefensible diner behavior: the no-show. And the industry's anger is real. "You don't no-show to your accountant. You don't no-show to your doctor. It's only in this weird industry where there's a total lack of ethics and accountability," says Rosoff. "The problem of no-shows is no joke."
But neither is it new. Nor does it appear, in the 200-some-odd-year history of the modern restaurant, to have ended the industry. "Overbooking and a bar to wait in!" said one chef-restaurateur, a ticket doubter, when I asked how he dealt with no-shows. "It's worked for years. It's ineffcient and it takes some intuition, but that's part of the equation." Indeed, this was the age-old improv of the maître d'—hoping that the six forty-five left a little early and the eight thirty came late, assuming someone would no-show but budgeting a round of drinks or an extra dessert for the overbooked if not.
"It's just not something that I have ever lost sleep over," says Danny Meyer, whose eight New York restaurants, not to mention wildly successful Shake Shack chain, have made him among the most influential hospitality figures in the world. "If it were that bad, we'd all be out of business right now."
Meyer, it should be noted, was an investor in OpenTable before its 2014 acquisition by Priceline. He concedes that tickets make perfect sense for a narrow band of restaurants like Alinea, but his broader objections are very much in line with the philosophy of "enlightened hospitality" he proselytizes in his book Setting the Table and elsewhere. "I'm a huge believer in trying to have a charitable assumption," he says. "At the end of the day, we're trying to provide pleasure for people. We're trying to make people feel good. And if you start by saying, 'By the way, I don't really trust you,' I don't think that sets up the right kind of experience. It just feels like the height of hubris to say that, relative to the 26,000 other options in New York City, you have to pay ahead for this one."
Hugh Acheson, who owns restaurants in Athens, Atlanta, and Savannah, Georgia, also remains untempted. Tickets, he fears, would limit the flexibility of his hospitality—the freedom to add or take a dish off someone's check, to respond to the moment in the dining room.
"Dining is not a fixed experience, and tickets try to make it that way," he says. They won't work, he says, "until you can create a perfect restaurant in which each seat and each experience is exactly the same. And you will also have created the world's most boring restaurant."
Why, Nick Kokonas asks, should going to dinner be any different from going to a play or to a Bears game? To which the only answer is: For the same reason wearing underwear in public is different from wearing a bathing suit. Because we know it is. More than anything, debating this issue with Kokonas and like-minded others reminded me of talking baseball with devotees of sabermetrics—that system of taking everything intuitive about the game and subjecting it to ruthless mathematical analysis. There's no harder argument than with people armed with both numbers and the faith that numbers mean everything. And there's no more powerless a debate position than that of the disrupted. After all, romance and nostalgia are the last refuges of a crank and a square.
But maybe my feeling isn't just curmudgeonliness. You need to trust me when I say that I am not a diner who gets hung up on being at the "right table"; I try to abide by Sirio Maccioni's maxim that, at least where he came from, in Europe, the quality of the table is made by who is sitting at it, not the other way around. And yet, at an otherwise dazzling meal at Alinea last fall, my girlfriend and I were seated at an awful table—all alone in the hushed silence of what felt like a forgotten spillover room on the way to the bathroom. Each of us had a sliver of a view into the main dining room, where the hum of conversation was warm and inviting. We could each see one-half of another couple as they ate, like figures in separate Dutch portraits. "I want to see other people," my girlfriend said, about midway through the meal. "Literally." I knew what she meant.
Was my mounting anger, my uncharacteristic resentment, all the ridiculous energy I spent worrying about our seats—until the room finally filled and the wine and pleasures of Achatz's giddily intellectual food won out—exacerbated by having already plunked down my $500? Was my response governed by the subtly inverted relationship that the ticket had created? It's hard for me to think that it wasn't.
"Food is, and restaurants are, what we take them to be," Acheson told me. "They are what we walk in believing them to be." What Kokonas offers restaurants seems too compelling not to be with us, in one form or another, for a long time to come. I sincerely hope it makes chefs' and restaurateurs' lives a little better and pays dividends for diners on the plate. But I also hope that he and those who will follow his lead have the brains and imagination not to disrupt something too delicate to appear on a spreadsheet or chart: what it feels like to eat in a great restaurant.
In return, let's make a pact, you and I: Don't fucking no-show. It is rude, it takes real money from good people, and it opens the door to all manner of mischief.
At a lunch in New Orleans recently, I found myself talking with Ralph Brennan, of the city's legendary Brennan hospitality family. After a few drinks and a dish of eggs Sardou, I brought up the idea of selling tickets to his restaurants. Brennan looked at me as though I had suggested opening a restaurant on Jupiter. "I think that kind of thing fundamentally changes our relationship," he said. "It's no longer me hosting you." But what about no-shows? What about effciency? Wouldn't it solve a bunch of problems? Now he looked as though the suggestion had been to run the Jupiter restaurant in the nude, singing cabaret songs.
He took a long sip of his Sazerac and said, "But all of that's my job."
