The era of NFT reservations and restaurants with pay walls is upon us

For as long as there have been celebrity-studded, high-status restaurants, there have been people clamoring to get into them, working contacts, calling, greasing their palms. Lately, though, it can seem like every restaurant in New York is one.

In the pandemic – with hours cut back in many cases, and a crowd eager to dine out again – competition on board has reached a frenetic pitch on online reservation platforms.

“Without embellishing too much, basically all reservations are taken within five seconds,” said Steve Saed, who started #FreeRezy, a free online forum where people can exchange reservations among themselves. “It’s like winning the lottery to eat at these places,” he added.

But a new generation of tactics has emerged to help would-be diners skip the line, including last-day concierge services, NFTs that give holders special privileges, members-only credit card perks and private “club restaurants.” What they all have in common is that they will cost you.

“How many years ago it was $20 for the host or hostess and bypass the line,” said Alex Lee, CEO of Resy and vice president of American Express Dining. He runs the companies’ Global Dining Network, a program that offers a select group of Amex members (Amex owns Resy) access to certain restaurant benefits through the reservation platform.

The program, he suggested, is just the natural evolution of the hidden $20. For an annual credit card fee of hundreds or sometimes thousands, Global Dining Access members can get priority reservations at hot restaurants across the United States. “The first thing customers want is access, right?” said Mr. Lee.

But at certain members-only restaurants, a reservation alone is not enough.

Haiku, a private Japanese restaurant in Miami, makes a slightly different calculation. The restaurant accepts members by invitation only, for an annual fee, and asks them to commit to at least four reservations annually for a 10- to 12-course kaiseki-inspired omakase menu. The restaurant declined to discuss either the application process or the price.

Jeff Zalaznick, a partner at Major Food Group, was only slightly more forthcoming about plans for the New York debut of ZZ’s Club, which will feature a members-only Carbone. Like the first ZZs in Miami, which offered members access to a Japanese restaurant, a sushi bar, a bar and lounge and a cigar lounge, ZZs Club New York will bring the Major Food Group experience to the financial and social elite. (Like Haiku, Major Food Group would not disclose the fee or the application process.)

But given that the original Carbone – which recently lost its Michelin star – is already impossible to get into, is it really necessary to have an even more exclusive version just two miles away?

“One of the nice things about being a private members club is the fact that you can really tailor everything on the food and beverage side to your customers at an even higher level than you can, obviously, when you’re just a public restaurant,” said Mr. Zalaznick.

This means knowing what members want, and exactly how they want it: How do they take their steak? Do they prefer stagnant or bubbling water? What is their standing order, and with what modifications?

Diners can have all these things at London import Casa Cruz, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, but for a stratospheric price tag. The top-floor dining room there is reserved for the 99 members of the restaurant’s “investor group of partners” who have paid between $250,000 and $500,000 to join.

“I think there’s a demand for curation,” said Noah Tepperberg, co-CEO of Tao Group Hospitality, which next year is opening a private club in Chicago’s River North neighborhood, in partnership with restaurant group Lettuce Entertain You.

In the grand tradition of private clubs – from New York City’s Union Club to San Francisco’s Bohemian Club to the recently renamed ‘Quin House in Boston – these exclusive club restaurants command not only money but status.

“Restaurants began as places to show off status,” said Andrew P. Haley, an associate professor of history at the University of Southern Mississippi. Usually this took place in public, where discerning diners could be seen demonstrating their judgment.

The members-only club restaurant, on the other hand, confers a different kind of status, suggested Megan J. Elias, the director of the gastronomy program at Boston University: “You can be a connoisseur among a very small number of connoisseurs.”

Mr. Saed said he is not surprised that access is being monetized.

“Part of that traces to the types of people who are renting in New York now,” he said. “With rent pushing over $4,000 to $5,000, I think the proportion of people living here who have discretionary income to spend is a little more here.”

Still other restaurants — the public kind — lean toward patronage-style programs, aimed at giving certain patrons prime access while remaining open to the rest of us.

Under normal circumstances, it can take weeks or months to get into Dame, the West Village fish-and-chips sensation. But there is a solution: Front of House, a platform designed to help restaurants sell “digital collectibles,” also known as NFTs, that give holders special access.

Instead of standing in line at 4:30 p.m. on a Monday, the one day Dame takes walk-in diners, a devoted diner can pay $1,000, giving them the ability to book a table once a week with at least 24 hours’ notice. until the end of 2022. (20 such tokens have been created; 11 have been sold so far.)

Stephanie Dumanian, a cosmetic dentist in Manhattan and a fan of the restaurant, was unsuccessfully trying to make a reservation for her husband’s birthday when she found Front of House. She bought a token in July, and has been three times since. “It’s been great,” she said. “I feel like I’m supporting a local business.”

Colin Camac, one of the founders of Front of House, said the platform simply accelerates intimacy.

“I think one of the best things in the world is to walk into a place just like Cheers, where everybody knows your name, where they know what you like, where your Martini is sitting there as soon as you walk in,” Mr. Camac said, who is also regional director of Resy. “It’s an easier way to be a part of that community if you don’t have the time to really invest in it.” In other words, anyone can be a regular, for a price.

“It’s kind of a trade secret in the concierge space that you have to build relationships, and spend a lot of time doing that, to deliver these very hard-to-get reservations,” said Peter Adams, the founder of Table Concierge.

His startup is for people with money but not time, and a potential diner doesn’t actually have to be a regular to be treated like one. “You can do this on your own,” he said, but he’s streamlining the process “so you don’t have to wake up at 8 or order at midnight.”

For a price — usually $50 per reservation per person, but it depends on the level of difficulty — Mr. Adams works to open doors that seem closed to the rest of us. (White glove service means he will go so far as to go to a restaurant in person to negotiate on behalf of a client.)

With a week’s warning, he puts the success rate at 90 percent. Do you want Lilia? He’ll get you Lilia, never mind what Resy says. “We can get you in anywhere but Rao’s,” he said of the upscale Italian restaurant in East Harlem.

Although he added, “But if you want to give me $10,000, I can find a way to get you into Rao’s.”