

Dinner: The Toughest Ticket in Town - fourmii
http://www.gq.com/story/dinner-reservations-high-end-dining?src=longreads&utm_content=buffer0fe06&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

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rspeer
I cannot understand the argument Brett Martin is making.

"Surely there was a distant era in which the desire to eat someplace didn't
guarantee that a thousand people like you also wanted to eat there at the same
time", he begins. What era are we talking about here? Seriously, what is he
referring to?

Right now, if you are in a city, you are surrounded by very good restaurants,
many of which will give you a table with very little advance planning. And
unless your city is on the decline, your food options are going to be better
and more numerous than ever before.

To have Brett Martin's sort of problems, you'd have to insist that you're only
going to eat at the most exquisite, high-end, overbooked restaurants. And in
that case the tickets certainly aren't hurting your ability to find a table.

In all the hand-wringing about tickets, he never says what's actually wrong
with them, except non-sequiturs such as "the same reason wearing underwear in
public is different from wearing a bathing suit. Because we know it is."

Is he missing the ability to slip a discreetly folded $100 bill to the server
and get preferentially seated? The ability to make a dinner reservation and
then ditch it? Not every restaurant needs tickets, but the kind of place the
article is about seems to benefit from them, and I cannot understand in the
slightest what Martin's problem is.

Not even the title is right. Having bought a restaurant ticket once, it wasn't
nearly as tough to get as, say, a ticket to a well-known band.

I've just wasted my time reading nonsensical claims about first-world problems
that aren't even problems.

~~~
codemac
> _Is he missing the ability to slip a discreetly folded $100 bill to the
> server and get preferentially seated?_

In my experience, even less. ~15% of what you expect to pay at the restaurant
is usually good enough, but that's trial and error not a hard rule.

------
PanMan
This article is against the ticketing, but I quite liked the long post
explaining why they went with tickets by the guy who build the system:
[http://website.alinearestaurant.com/2014/06/tickets-for-
rest...](http://website.alinearestaurant.com/2014/06/tickets-for-restaurants/)

------
iamthepieman
I love food. My wife loves food. I don't just mean we love to go to exquisite
overbooked restaurants. We raise our own vegetables, pigs, chickens (egg and
meat), cook classic and experimental dishes together and enjoy all of it.

That said, I have eaten exactly once at a restaurant where the restaurant WAS
the main attraction and reason for the evening.

Every other time it was for convenience, to celebrate something, just part of
an evening out or on the way to some other event etc.

The author seems to be focusing exclusively on dining-as-experience
establishments not the myriad of other places some of which also have
fantastic food, great service, or new and interesting culinary experiences.

In my limited experience, ticketing is neither the next big thing or a big
problem to be worried about.

