3 ms·

Dinner: The Toughest Ticket in Town

13 points by fourmii 11y ago

rspeer 11y ago
I cannot understand the argument Brett Martin is making. "Surely there was a distant era in which the desire to eat someplace didn't guarantee that a thousand people like you also wanted to eat there at the same time", he begins. What era are we talking about here? Seriously, what is he referring to? Right now, if you are in a city, you are surrounded by very good restaurants, many of which will give you a table with very little advance planning. And unless your city is on the decline, your food options are going to be better and more numerous than ever before. To have Brett Martin's sort of problems, you'd have to insist that you're only going to eat at the most exquisite, high-end, overbooked restaurants. And in that case the tickets certainly aren't hurting your ability to find a table. In all the hand-wringing about tickets, he never says what's actually wrong with them, except non-sequiturs such as "the same reason wearing underwear in public is different from wearing a bathing suit. Because we know it is." Is he missing the ability to slip a discreetly folded $100 bill to the server and get preferentially seated? The ability to make a dinner reservation and then ditch it? Not every restaurant needs tickets, but the kind of place the article is about seems to benefit from them, and I cannot understand in the slightest what Martin's problem is. Not even the title is right. Having bought a restaurant ticket once, it wasn't nearly as tough to get as, say, a ticket to a well-known band. I've just wasted my time reading nonsensical claims about first-world problems that aren't even problems.
- codemac 11y ago
  > Is he missing the ability to slip a discreetly folded $100 bill to the server and get preferentially seated? In my experience, even less. ~15% of what you expect to pay at the restaurant is usually good enough, but that's trial and error not a hard rule.
PanMan 11y ago
This article is against the ticketing, but I quite liked the long post explaining why they went with tickets by the guy who build the system: http://website.alinearestaurant.com/2014/06/tickets-for-restaurants/ http://website.alinearestaurant.com/2014/06/tickets-for-rest...
iamthepieman 11y ago
I love food. My wife loves food. I don't just mean we love to go to exquisite overbooked restaurants. We raise our own vegetables, pigs, chickens (egg and meat), cook classic and experimental dishes together and enjoy all of it. That said, I have eaten exactly once at a restaurant where the restaurant WAS the main attraction and reason for the evening. Every other time it was for convenience, to celebrate something, just part of an evening out or on the way to some other event etc. The author seems to be focusing exclusively on dining-as-experience establishments not the myriad of other places some of which also have fantastic food, great service, or new and interesting culinary experiences. In my limited experience, ticketing is neither the next big thing or a big problem to be worried about.

13 points by fourmii 11y ago

I cannot understand the argument Brett Martin is making. "Surely there was a distant era in which the desire to eat someplace didn't guarantee that a thousand people like you also wanted to eat there at the same time", he begins. What era are we talking about here? Seriously, what is he referring to? Right now, if you are in a city, you are surrounded by very good restaurants, many of which will give you a table with very little advance planning. And unless your city is on the decline, your food options are going to be better and more numerous than ever before. To have Brett Martin's sort of problems, you'd have to insist that you're only going to eat at the most exquisite, high-end, overbooked restaurants. And in that case the tickets certainly aren't hurting your ability to find a table. In all the hand-wringing about tickets, he never says what's actually wrong with them, except non-sequiturs such as "the same reason wearing underwear in public is different from wearing a bathing suit. Because we know it is." Is he missing the ability to slip a discreetly folded $100 bill to the server and get preferentially seated? The ability to make a dinner reservation and then ditch it? Not every restaurant needs tickets, but the kind of place the article is about seems to benefit from them, and I cannot understand in the slightest what Martin's problem is. Not even the title is right. Having bought a restaurant ticket once, it wasn't nearly as tough to get as, say, a ticket to a well-known band. I've just wasted my time reading nonsensical claims about first-world problems that aren't even problems.

codemac 11y ago
> Is he missing the ability to slip a discreetly folded $100 bill to the server and get preferentially seated? In my experience, even less. ~15% of what you expect to pay at the restaurant is usually good enough, but that's trial and error not a hard rule.

PanMan 11y ago

This article is against the ticketing, but I quite liked the long post explaining why they went with tickets by the guy who build the system: http://website.alinearestaurant.com/2014/06/tickets-for-restaurants/ http://website.alinearestaurant.com/2014/06/tickets-for-rest...

iamthepieman 11y ago

I love food. My wife loves food. I don't just mean we love to go to exquisite overbooked restaurants. We raise our own vegetables, pigs, chickens (egg and meat), cook classic and experimental dishes together and enjoy all of it. That said, I have eaten exactly once at a restaurant where the restaurant WAS the main attraction and reason for the evening. Every other time it was for convenience, to celebrate something, just part of an evening out or on the way to some other event etc. The author seems to be focusing exclusively on dining-as-experience establishments not the myriad of other places some of which also have fantastic food, great service, or new and interesting culinary experiences. In my limited experience, ticketing is neither the next big thing or a big problem to be worried about.