reservations

Would You Pay For A Restaurant Reservation?

Filed under: Dining

Trying to get a table at a hot restaurant is often an exercise in frustration. But what if, instead of making the calls yourself, or paying a concierge to try and get you in, you could log on to a website and buy the reservation. That's the basic idea behind TableXchange. The service offers reservation for a fee in New York City, San Francisco and the Hamptons and already has around 1,000 members. For example, for $25 you can get a table for two at Jean Georges this Friday. The idea is already causing controversy. Some in the New York hospitality industry find it manipulative and distasteful. Many people find it similar to the process of ticket scalping in which tickets to hot events often sell for far above their face value. The main difference, of course, is that restaurants reservations don't usually come with a price tag, although certainly money has been used to obtain reservations and/or hot tables for years, just through more oblique methods. TableXhange makes its money by taking a commission from each sale as well as through advertising revenue.

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Tags: fine dining, new york, reservations, restaurants, tablexchange

The 10 Hardest to Get Restaurant Reservations

by Rigel Celeste (RSS feed) —

Filed under: Dining

This is the time of year where special occasions and rare visits from family and friends are plentiful, and although home cooking is a big part of the season so is eating out -- because when people are in from out of town you hardly want to take them down to the local "all-you-can-eat for $4.99" buffet to celebrate their visit. But if you don't want to get stuck choosing between either the buffet or McDonald's then you might want to plan ahead, because as we all know everybody else in town is going to have the same idea!

If you have plans to hit the local fine dining hot spot this holiday season you better check to see if it's on this Forbes list of the top ten toughest to score restaurant reservations:

Gallery: Ten of the Toughest Restaurant Reservations