At noon on a recent Wednesday, San Francisco’s Lazy Bear restaurant began taking reservations for June. Just 45 minutes later, nearly every seat for the entire month was sold out.
Not reserved. Sold. As in, every meal for almost every seat for an entire month bought and paid for in advance.
That’s because Lazy Bear uses an increasingly popular ticketing- system model for its “reservations” that asks diners to pay upfront for their meals much the way theater patrons pay for their seats. The tickets cannot be refunded or changed, although they can be given to someone else, much as one could with tickets to a concert or a baseball game.
Lazy Bear and other restaurants across the country are using technology to change the way we book and pay for restaurant meals, and maybe even the way we think about eating out.
“The main issue is trying to manage risk, trying to incentivize patrons to keep their reservations,” says Northwestern University microeconomic theorist Jeffrey Ely, noting that ticketing systems transfer all the risk to the diner. “These are things that have always been goals or needs of the restaurant market. The only reason they’re now manifesting themselves is that the technology is there to make it possible.”
Restaurantgoers have been making online reservations since the advent of OpenTable in the late 1990s. But platforms such as ticketing and a bevy of new apps — think table auctions and a digital concierge — could mean more seats for eager diners and fewer empty tables for restaurants.
The ticketed-reservations model was pioneered in 2011 by Nick Kokonas, co-owner with Grant Achatz of the innovative Chicago restaurants Next, Alinea and The Aviary. Kokonas says this summer he expects to release Tock, a commercial version of the computer software he uses. Tock will allow restaurants to manage table inventory and create different types of tickets, from fully prepaid meals to ordinary reservations. For example, one variation would let restaurants collect deposits during the reservation process that later would be applied to the food and drink tab.
“When people buy a ticket or put down a deposit, they show up at a much greater rate,” says Kokonas, who estimates the number of people who fail to show up for unpaid reservations at 10 percent.
Restaurants in nine U.S. cities are currently testing the system, Kokonas says.
