How to Get the Hottest Tables in Town… For a Price
It’s Wednesday night and you need a table at the famed French brasserie Balthazar for 2 this Friday. Or perhaps you just got into Manhattan for a trip and you want a table for 4 at the celeb hot spot Nobu. In the often cut-throat restaurant scene in New York, unless your name is Michael Bloomberg or Rupert Murdoch, your chances are zero-to-none that you could get a reservation… until now.
TableXchange, a third-party online site, offers diners a platform on which they can purchase and sell their reservations to top-notch New York City restaurants. Most reservations go for a price between $15 and $40. A quick look at the site today shows reservations available for 2 people on Friday at 7:30pm at Union Square Grill available for $25 and for 4 people at Peter Luger Steak House at 8:45pm for $35, among a long list of others.
Here is how it works:
- Browse. You browse the list of restaurants that have reservations available for purchase.
- Order. Log-in and purchase the reservation through a secure checkout.
- Confirm. Immediately after purchase, you will receive an email with the name of the original person holding the reservation. You then call the restaurant to confirm the reservation using the given reservation name.
While TableXchange allows any average person to enjoy the once-out-of-reach restaurants of New York City, there are a few restaurants are fuming over this new practice of selling reservations. It seems that certain restaurants (Babbo) want to maintain the exclusivity of the reservation list and have threatened to deny any reservation that is purchased through websites like TableXchange. As of yet, none have done so, but they probably won’t be too pleased when you show up.
TableXchange only sells reservations to select restaurants on Friday and Saturday night. Any other night of the week, you may have to resort to the old trick of slipping a $50 to the maître d’hôtel and hope it works. As of now, TableXchange serves New York City, The Hamptons, and San Francisco.
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