He explains the system in the first 5 minutes of this video. Seems like BS to me. Do restaurants actually do this?
https://youtu.be/03MGiRLFoAM?si=mMNaRvYyOjCcxsk8
by valoremz
He explains the system in the first 5 minutes of this video. Seems like BS to me. Do restaurants actually do this?
https://youtu.be/03MGiRLFoAM?si=mMNaRvYyOjCcxsk8
by valoremz
24 Comments
Keeping notes about their clientele? They sure do. It’s on their little computer screens.
Keeping notes on guests and reserving preferred times/tables for well-paying regulars? Of course they do.
Any good restaurant does this, and modern online systems have made it much easier.
Wow, image going to all that trouble just to eat at a restaurant.
It all makes sense, he’s running a business. He wants the highest paying 200 people eating there every night. They’re not looking for people to split dessert and hang out for 2 hours drinking coffee. They want people ordering $5,000 bottles of wine.
Keith McNally posted about this once on his IG. If you want be to treated like a VIP go in and spend 10,000 on food and beverage then the host will drop you a card with the VIP reservation number.
Are you kidding me?
This is every restauranteur’s dream : to have a restaurant so popular that *YOU* get to screen out all the douchebags and flakes from your reservations book so you can have a restaurant full of decent, well behaved (and fun!) clientele.
It’s Mario carbone
This is the way that most long lived successful restaurants do it in NYC. McNally was doing this 20+ years ago.
Think of every movie from like the 60s to 70s that you’ve seen were the Diner guy who knows the locals and has their coffee ready or has their favorite seat ready, Knows exactly how they like their burger etc.… there is definitely a digital version of that for most restaurants.
And if you have as popular of a restaurant as this guy has it’s really easy to just weed out the assholes and makes everybody’s life better. Waitresses get paid well, kitchen staff gets hooked up and the people who are dope get a little extra service on top. And it really is this easy you just gotta be considerate of other people when you dine out but most people just choose to be an asshole who want it their way.
Most if not all trendy restaurants do this. Polo Bar, Carbone, 4 Charles, The Corner Store, Don Angie, Tatiana etc. They don’t want randos who treat employees poorly, tip poorly, and dress poorly.
No idea but that was an interested couple hour podcast
Absolutely. I’ve worked at spots that have gone even further and will Google you when you make a reservation to see who you are and what you do for a living to gauge if we should go the extra mile to impress you.
Only happens in the bubble of NYC.. across country not as common I think its not possible to control a dining room like that. Top 1% of restaurants
Yeah, my buddy is blacklisted and lives 2 blocks away 😂
Of course they do- i do business in the city snd can walk in alot of places with no reservation based on how i tip and volume order from the restaurant.
What’s this YouTube link?
03 M GiRL FoAM???
I remember they did this in the The Bear
Carbone? Tourist traps. Awful food. Incredible ripoffs
All the top nyc trendy restaurants do this. Carbone 4 charles torrisi all hold their prime seats for “selected” clientele
I wonder if Resy maintains some kind of master list that they sell to restaurants like a profile of clients’ dining habits & how much they spend and tip..
The one thing in that section that’s a little disingenuous is when he talks about how “when someone calls for a reservation, we see the info in the system…”. Carbone famously doesn’t even have a phone number published, so no one is calling for a reservation unless they’re already somehow an insider/preferred. You can’t call them.
not surprised that Mario Carbone is salty about Michelin given he lost his star
Is Carbone just Parm with lots of pretense?
I worked at one of the top steakhouses in the city for years. We kept detailed notes on everyone — regulars, VIPs, and people we straight-up blacklisted (rude, bad tippers, people who get too drunk). Anytime *those* people called, we just told them we were fully booked. Every. Single. Time.
When a regular came in, we made sure they had their favorite table, their favorite server, their usual drink already waiting. But VIPs? Whole different universe. We’d block off their favorite table for two hours *before* they even showed up — no one sat there, no matter how busy we were. I’d even sprint across the city to grab cupcakes from the bakery they loved — not because they asked, but because we *wanted* to.
And it paid off. They’d drop thousands in tips every time, no matter what the bill was.