i'm ryan sutton, the new york food critic for bloomberg news.
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
Bad Deal Rule No. 91: It’s Supremely Uncool When an Expensive Restaurant Bounces You to Voicemail During Business Hours
Pete Wells of The New York Times had a pretty great time eating at Blanca, the $180 tasting menu-only restaurant in Bushwick. But he had some difficulties with the reservations process. He writes:
- “I secured one reservation simply by phoning on the first day of the month, when Blanca opens and then closes its reservation book for the coming weeks. That tactic never worked again. On Oct. 1, I placed nearly 40 calls to the restaurant. They all bounced straight to voice mail, giving me some time to wonder whether there is any point in writing about a 12-seat restaurant that serves 60 people a week. If I have trouble getting in the door three times to do my job, how many readers will manage it even once?”
I had similar issues with Blanca reservations as well, though I’ll discuss that further when I file my Bloomberg News review sometime before Christmas.
In the meantime, allow me to make a suggestion: Tiny spots like Blanca and Brooklyn Fare should switch to electronic-only reservations. It worked for Momofuku Ko, Alinea, Next, Seiobo, Shoto, The NoMad Rooftop, and other pricey restaurants with limited space. With online bookings, there’s never any busy signal, never any straight-to-voicemail. With online resies, you get an immediate answer. It takes three minutes out of your day, instead of three hundred redials over an hour.
Pop-Quiz: If you run an expensive tasting menu-only restaurant, do you want your guest’s first experience with your venue to be:
- Busy signals
- Voicemails
- Friendly web/mobile screens informing guests how many seats remain.
I’ll take door number three, thank you very much. The guest experience starts not at the restaurant, but with the venue’s website or the reservations process. You can’t blame an excellent restaurant for being popular, but you can blame it for making it burdensome to find out whether the eatery is booked up or not. And while I have my own opinions about Blanca, if Pete Wells did in fact deduct a star because of the reservations hassle, I can’t really disagree with that.
It’s all fair game folks.
