Resy co-founder Ben Leventhal launches Blackbird, a restaurant loyalty program

Consider the restaurant NFT: A digital resource few of us use and even fewer of us understand, sometimes ranging in price from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. Like ancient talismans, they conjure up a host of perks for their deep-pocketed owners, including priority reservations at the city’s hottest restaurants and entry to Carbone at Hudson Yards, the more exclusive version of the original Carbone in Greenwich Village, which recently turned away Justin Bieber.

For a while it seemed that most of us would never own a restaurant NFT. Now we all will, in theory.

Blackbird, a new restaurant loyalty program, pairs NFTs with VIP treatment, so even if you weren’t planning on owning a fancy digital asset this year, the company is betting that free food is enough to change your mind. The platform launched this month at two restaurants in New York, with several more to be rolled out in the coming weeks. Here’s the kicker: It comes from Ben Leventhal, co-founder of Eater, who changed the way this city eats when he launched reservation company Resy in 2014.

With Resy, Leventhal bet that diners wanted a better way to make online reservations – and won big. Blackbird is a different kind of gambling, that something as ethereal and desirable as being a regular can be turned into an online object: A restaurant NFT.

“Blackbird is here to create meaningful connection between restaurants and their customers,” Leventhal wrote in a post on Substack earlier this month. “By connection, we mean direct connection, where guests know that the more they show up, the better their experience will be.” Leventhal declined to speak to Eater for this article.

At its core, Blackbird is a loyalty program for diners, who can track their trips to participating restaurants and earn rewards for repeat visits. Built on that platform is a toolset that restaurant owners can use to collect data about their customers, crowdsource money from their most loyal fans, and more.

The company encourages customers to “check in” at restaurants by touching their phones to stickers located at restaurant entrances and near their registers. They are equipped with NFC chips – the same technology that New Yorkers use to get on the subway or buy groceries with their phones.

Pressing one for the first time prompts users to enter their name and phone number. After that, each tap counts as a check-in, and repeated visits to the same restaurant unlock rewards usually reserved for regulars, investors and friends of the owners, such as free appetizers and priority when ordering reservations.

A customer’s status at a restaurant is stored on Blackbird’s website and app, which is still under construction, in a digital “punch card”, also called an NFT. Each restaurant has its own card with a unique design that keeps track of a customer’s progress towards rewards. They are not interchangeable between users, although Leventhal teased that people may be able to transfer the cards — that is, their status as permanent — down the line.

At Gertie, a contemporary Jewish restaurant in Williamsburg that launched at Blackbird earlier this month, customers checking in for the first time get a free pastry. On your next visit to the restaurant, coffee is free. Over time, customers can collect other perks, such as free bagel sandwiches (every five visits), invitations to members-only events (after 10 check-ins), and a dedicated phone number for the host booth to make last-minute reservations (after 15).

“It works like a punch card in a coffee shop,” says Nate Adler, the restaurant’s owner. At least that’s the idea. Although customers are used to paying for meals and making reservations with their phones, checking in at a restaurant in New York City is virtually unheard of. According to Adler, only a couple of customers check in at Gertie using Blackbird each day. “It’s not that habit yet,” he says.

Still, prominent restaurant owners are giving Blackbird a shot, in part because of Leventhal’s background as a co-founder of Resy, the startup that took on OpenTable and won. “If anyone is going to pull this off, it’s Ben Leventhal,” says Nick Morgenstern, owner of Manhattan ice cream shop Morgenstern’s.

He signed with the platform in March, before opening Bananas, a vegan soft-serve shop taking over the original location of Morgenstern’s on the Lower East Side. The business opens May 1, but customers who pay $33.33 to become “members” can enter today. “This should not be exclusive,” according to Morgenstern, who says he is using the money to cover salary and food costs ahead of full opening.

Members get one free soft serve per day during the preview period, which runs from April 20th to April 30th. When Bananas opens to the public, the store will transition to a loyalty program similar to Gertie’s. “You want people to come back again and again,” says Morgenstern. “It is the bread and butter of food service.”

The challenge before Blackbird and its users is to find a way to make special treatment feel special, even if everyone gets it. Take it from Twitter, which recently diluted its biggest asset, the blue check, by allowing bots to be verified for $8 a month.

Leventhal appeared to acknowledge this in a post on Substack earlier this month announcing Gertie’s launch on the platform. “For the restaurant industry to get the right loyalty,” he wrote, “these programs need to be tailored and organic.”

Disclosure: Ben Leventhal co-founded Eater in 2005.