Bruce Feiler - Where God Was Born, Abraham, Walking The Bible

Call at Midnight
Thursday, April 5, 2007

A few years ago I wrote a piece for GOURMET called "Pocketful of Dough" about how to bribe your way into a restaurant. That makes me a magnet, and a sucker, for similar stories. The WSJ did an exhaustive study of how to crack an uncrackable reservation. The results are behind the firewall, but here are a few tips.

Nearly 400,000 attempted reservations later, we discovered some basic rules for booking tables anywhere, as well as some that apply to specific restaurants. One rule: Plan ahead -- but not too far ahead. It turned out the "sweet spot" for advance booking is four weeks out, a window that gave us a success rate on OpenTable of about 47%. That dropped to 35% when we tried to book 40 days ahead.

Not that spontaneity doesn't pay off. From Excelsior in Boston to New York's Morimoto, certain restaurants shared a pattern. Tables were plentiful with about two weeks notice, then scarce a week out. But around Thursday the week we wanted to dine, a bunch of spots opened up -- the likely result of restaurants confirming reservations two or three days out then putting cancellations back in the system.

There are also techniques to be learned from people who make it either their business or their hobby to get into so-called impossible places. Aren Sandersen, a 28-year-old software engineer in San Francisco, spent several nights, throughout the course of a few weeks, staying up late and pinging OpenTable again and again, searching for a table at the famously difficult French Laundry in the Napa Valley. Eventually, he discovered that success was most likely if he set his clock to Time.gov, then clicked "reload" at exactly 11:59:55 p.m.
After what he calls an "exquisite," meal at the restaurant, Mr. Sandersen created a Web site called TheSandersens.com where he posted his tips and started offering a free service to help others book at the restaurant. "Are you struggling to make French Laundry reservations? Tired of calling and getting only busy signals?" a note on the home page reads. "No longer!"

Labels: Food

Posted by B Feiler at 8:03 AM
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