Restaurant Reservation Insanity

[upbeat music] Two years ago, Resy co-founder and Blackbird founder Ben Leventhal told the New Yorker writer this about the difficulties of getting a reservation at a hot restaurant.

"The average diner in New York City is massively disadvantaged, and they don't even know it.

It's as if they're bringing a knife to a gunfight." Have you noticed that even if you log on to make a restaurant reservation at the appointed time, usually 30 days in advance, you probably won't find any tables at all, or maybe you get the 5:00 to 10:30 fandango.

Why is that? What, if anything, can a serious eater do about this sad and infuriating state of affairs? How did we arrive at this moment? To our rescue come Wall Street Journal columnist Adam Chandler and the Journal's restaurant industry reporter Heather Haddon.

[gentle music] They recently did a deep dive in the Journal on this sad state of affairs, so I invited them to hang out on Special Sauce to bring us up to speed.

I think restaurants are feeling more and more squeezed to not raise prices, because after the pandemic and all this inflation, customers are just more and more, uh, sensitive to big price increases.

So they have less and less room to make things work.

And so what's important for them is to make sure that those tables are filled, butts are in seats at all times.

And so these apps do help with that.

The whole thing kind of turned into an arms race, and once it expanded beyond the reservation apps, we have credit card companies, we have delivery apps, we have people who are not necessarily part of the restaurant or food and beverage ecosystem wading into this fight.

That kind of takes the, the agency, I would say, out of the hands of restaurants and, and places them in the hands of people who may or may not have the best interests of restaurants at heart.

[upbeat music] I'm Ed Levine, founder of Serious Eats.

Back in a moment.