Category: Breakfast Restaurants

The restaurant industry has changed in innumerable ways in recent years, but one shift Dallas diners are coming to terms with is the growing demand for restaurant reservations and the dwindling ability to get a table without one.

The surge in demand for table bookings picked up speed in 2021 as people eagerly returned to in-person dining once COVID-19 cases dropped, but the shift seems here to stay. Walk-in seat availability is harder to come by, and making reservations only a day or two out at popular restaurants often means taking early or late-night seating — or striking out altogether.

The uptick in demand for restaurant reservations is happening nationally. Online searches for reservations in the first quarter of 2022 were up 107% from the same time frame in 2021, according to national data from Yelp. We talked with several local restaurants who said they’ve seen a noticeable owner rise in demand for reservations at Dallas restaurants in the past year.

There are several reasons for the shift. First, there’s the matter of planning and convenience, which is no different now than it’s always been. Diners have schedules to juggle, babysitters to hire, and celebrations to plan around, all of which factor into the demand for reservations.

Then there’s the matter of social currency. Hard-to-get reservations have become a signal of social status. The country’s most coveted restaurant bookings are now being sold to people willing to pay anonymous sellers thousands of dollars on black market sites, like one run by a 34-year-old in Miami, according to a new report from the San Francisco Chronicles.

But restaurants are really driving this change in reservation culture. Still facing workforce shortages and rising operating costs, some restaurants have reduced their hours or scaled down their footprints. This has led restaurants to rely more heavily on reservations to run their businesses, and they’re encouraging them more than ever in a climate of economic uncertainty, says Emily Knight, president of the Texas Restaurant Association.

“In Dallas, we’re running at about a 20% [restaurant] staffing shortage, and with that you’re going to have fewer tables and slimmer menus,” Knight says. “So now what you have is a restaurant that needs much more thoughtful staffing and to know who is coming in and when to dine. And they need to ensure that if that person makes a reservation, that they’re going to really come in.”

TakeTatsu, for example. The omakase restaurant opened in Dallas’ Deep Ellum neighborhood in May 2022 and has already become “the city’s hardest reservation,” according to D Magazine dining critic Brian Reinhart. To get a seat at Tatsu, hopeful diners set alarms for 8 am on the first and the 15th of the month when reservations for the tasting menu, which must be paid in full at $170 per person, are released in two-week batches. The seats go quickly. After all, there are only 10 seats and two seats a night.

Matthew Ciccone, owner of Tatsu, says offering a limited number of prepaid reservations is pivotal to their business model and to ensure the level of hospitality and food they strive to execute. He found that releasing any more than 10 days of reservations at a time increases the likelihood of cancellations, even with a policy in place that asks for cancellations to be made five days in advance.

“By doing it this way, we are controlling our food waste and ordering exactly what we need. The other side of that coin is why we ask for full payment up front. We pay our staff what they should be doing by doing this,” he says. “We can also really tailor the menu to the guests that book, and the only way to do that is to have that money up front.”

Ciccone says there has been a noticeable change in restaurant reservation demands in the Dallas dining scene in the past few years, and he sees it as Dallas catching up to other major cities like New York, where he lived for a decade.

“There’s no such thing as dining out without a reservation there,” he says. “I think this is going to be a new thing here [in Dallas] and part of the trade-off that we’re making with having more good restaurants.”

With that change, though, comes the possibility of people taking advantage of the demand and reselling restaurant reservations for a profit, and it’s something Ciccone is trying to hold off.

“We did an analysis with Tock [a booking site] to make sure people were not using computer programs to book reservations. Tock doesn’t allow people to use a script to book reservations, so we feel comfortable

Activists have targeted the Knightsbridge steak restaurant owned by controversial chef Salt Bae.

Animal Rebellion, an offshoot of Extinction Rebellion, is campaigning for a “plant-based food system and mass rewilding”.

They said that eight people entered the Nusret steakhouse in the upmarket central London district at about 6pm on Saturday and sat at tables that had already been reserved.

Student Ben Thomas, 20, said: “Restaurants like these are symbolic of a broken system.

“Whilst two million people are relying on food banks in the UK right now, influencer chefs are selling gold-plated steaks for more than £1,000.

“Steaks, and other red meats, that we know carry the highest environmental impacts.”

Video shared by the protest group showed a woman being carried out onto the street by restaurant staff, and left to sit on the curb.

The Metropolitan Police said officers were called to the scene just after 6pm, but found their attendance was not needed as the protesters had left by then.

The restaurant, one of more than a dozen Nusr-Et Steakhouse branches around the world, opened late last year and its prices quickly astonished diners.

A receipt from one diner was shared online soon after the opening showing a rack of lamb costing £200, a giant tomahawk steak for £630, £9 for a Coca-Cola, £11 for a Red Bull, £12 for sweetcorn and £ 100 for a “golden burger”.

The man behind it is Nusret Gokce, who founded internet fame in 2017 thanks to a video of him theatrically dropping salt from a height on to a steak.

Animal Rebellion’s Twitter feed said there had also been a protest at Manchester’s Mana restaurant “to demand an end to climate chaos, inequality and animal exploitation in the form of a transition to a plant based future”.

Video footage shared just after 9.30pm showed one person being hauled out of the restaurant by a man with a police vest and others.

It comes weeks after a similar stunt at Gordon Ramsay’s three-star Michelin restaurant in London’s Chelsea district.