Ninety Nine Restaurant & Pub, a Massachusetts-based chain of family-friendly restaurants, abruptly closed three locations in Connecticut Monday.
A spokesperson for the chain confirmed Tuesday that Ninety Nine had closed its restaurants in Cromwell, Groton and Stratford on Nov. 28, effective immediately.
“The Ninety Nine is in the process of transferring Team Members to our other restaurant locations in Connecticut or offering them severance packages,” the company said in the statement. “The Ninety Nine values its guests and the local communities, and thanks everyone for their patronage.”
Remaining Ninety Nine restaurants are in Bristol, Enfield, Glastonbury, Killingly, Norwich, Torrington, Vernon and Wallingford.
The chain, based in Woburn, Mass., has more than 100 locations in New England and New York state, with the bulk of the restaurants in Massachusetts. The website Boston Restaurant Talk noted that Ninety-Nine has closed three locations in the Bay State this year, most recently its Canton restaurant on Nov. 27.
National diner chain Denny’s has also closed multiple locations in Connecticut this fall. Restaurants in Enfield, West Haven, Wethersfield and Vernon suddenly closed between Sept. 5 and Oct. 17, leaving four remaining Denny’s in the state.
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.
Master sushi chef Tatsuya Sekiguchi prepares sushi at Tatsu in Deep Ellum, Thursday, May 19, 2022.(Elias Valverde II / Staff Photographer)
“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
An Upstate restaurant worker who found out his schedule had changed got rate Monday morning and pulled a gun on the other employees, sparking a school lockdown, police said. Anderson Police Chief Jim Stewart released the police report showing Gary Lamar Brown, 44, of Anderson , was charged with simple assault, second-degree assault and battery, three counts of pointing a firearm at another person and unlawful carry of a weapon. The report said police responded about 9:45 am to a call about a hostile employee who had pulled a gun on other employees at Mission Grill on Greenville Street. The report said Brown was mad because his work hours had been cut, according to employees. Employees told police Brown started scaring and threatening other employees before he left the store. Brown came back to the store 20 minutes later and was told, because of his behavior earlier in the morning, he was fired, the general manager said. That’s when Brown became angry, pulled a pistol from his waist and started ed threatened everyone, the report said. The general manager told police he had just come out of the restroom when he heard a loud argument in the dining room and saw Brown pointing a gun at other employees. Brown hit one of the employees in the back of the head with the pistol, according to the report. Brown also threw a laptop at them as well as damaging a light above the counter the employees were standing behind, according to the report. The general manager said he went to his car and got his concealed carry handgun and that he and another employee blocked Brown from the rest of the employees. The hurt employee continued talking to Brown while the general manager helped get the other employees to the back freezer , according to the report. Brown left the restaurant on a bicycle and was later arrested at his home on Babb Street, according to the report. McCants Middle School was put on lockdown, according to the report. According to Kyle Newton, with Anderson School District 5, several other schools were put on into a “holding pattern” during the incident. The employee hit with the gun was checked out by emergency medical services but was not taken to the hospital, the report said. Investigators said the whole incident inside the restaurant was captured on security video.
ANDERSON, SC —
An Upstate restaurant worker who found out his schedule had changed got rate Monday morning and pulled a gun on the other employees, sparking a school lockdown, police said.
Anderson Police Chief Jim Stewart released the police report showing Gary Lamar Brown, 44, of Anderson, was charged with simple assault, second-degree assault and battery, three counts of pointing a firearm at another person and unlawful carry of a weapon.
The report said police respondents about 9:45 am to a call about a hostile employee who had pulled a gun on other employees at Mission Grill on Greenville Street.
The report said Brown was mad because his work hours had been cut, according to employees.
Employees told police Brown started scaring and threatening other employees before he left the store.
Brown came back to the store 20 minutes later and was told, because of his behavior earlier in the morning, he was fired, the general manager said.
That’s when Brown became angry, pulled a pistol from his waist and started threatening everyone, the report said.
The general manager told police he had just come out of the restroom when he heard a loud argument in the dining room and saw Brown pointing a gun at other employees.
Brown hit one of the employees in the back of the head with the gun, according to the report.
Brown also threw a laptop at them as well as damaging a light above the counter the employees were standing behind, according to the report.
The general manager said he went to his car and got his concealed carry handgun and that he and another employee blocked Brown from the rest of the employees.
The hurt employee continued talking to Brown while the general manager helped get the other employees to the back freezer, according to the report.
Brown left the restaurant on a bicycle and was later arrested at his home on Babb Street, according to the report.
McCants Middle School was put on lockdown, according to the report.
According to Kyle Newton, with Anderson School District 5, several other schools were put on into a “holding pattern” during the incident.
The employee hit with the gun was checked out by emergency medical services but was not taken to the hospital, the report said.
Investigators said the whole incident inside the restaurant was captured on security video.
/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/dmn/3DQ4XSZHLNE7RH3CPBI6ZX6754.jpg)