Hello, welcome to Slate Money Food, our mini series on everything food related.

We are talking this week about restaurant reservations, which are an absolutely fascinating subject.

I'm sure it's something that a lot of people don't really think too much about, but pick up that little corner of the carpet and look underneath.

And there's a huge amount of stuff going on underneath there which

Marissa Conrad knows everything about Marissa hi

Introduce yourself who are you and how do you know about this subject? I'm a freelance journalist. I write about culture, food and economics

overlaps very nicely into the restaurant reservation world. I recently covered the world of restaurant reservation platforms for a New York magazine and I'm just personally fascinated by the topic.

So we are going to talk about the platforms because of course there are platforms

aren't there there's open table and resi we're going to talk about how a

restaurant reservations work from the restaurant and from the diner and we're going to talk about the secondary market in reservations.

We're going to talk about concierges. All of that coming up on slate money food.

So let's start with just in general who needs reservations who are they for they are they so that I can make a reservation so that I know there will be a table waiting for me? Is it mostly at higher end restaurants? Are they basically a tool for restaurants to be able to distribute demand?

Like, who's the main beneficiary

of this whole ecosystem?

Restaurant reservations are a fascinating ecosystem. I would say multiple people need them, multiple people benefit from them.

The obvious person who is benefiting is you, the diner. You don't have to wait for a table, you can be sure that there's a space for you when you go in.

That's all great. But the side of it I think people don't think about is how much the restaurants need to count on

reservations. It really helps them plan for how much food to buy, if they can accept walk-ins or not,

if they know they're at 95% capacity,

they're going to have to be turning people away.

And that's where things get a little tricky

because if you are the kind of diner who thinks,

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