| In today’s newsletter, Adam Iscoe goes inside the wild world of restaurant reservations—and offers some simple (and other far less simple) tips for getting the hottest tables in town. That’s part of this week’s digital Food Issue, which you can read more about below. Plus: essential reading on David Pecker and the National Enquirer to help you make sense of the latest developments in the Trump hush-money trial. | | | |
| Adam Iscoe shares a few tips he learned from his deep-dive into the reservation wars. As I was reporting on the cutthroat and confusing world of restaurant reservations, almost everyone I spoke with (from reservation-app executives to high-end restaurateurs and celebrity chefs) expressed a desire for dining out to be more democratic for customers. This struck me as an odd point to emphasize; reservations have never been harder to get, and, in many cases, are more dependent than ever on someone spending big money to secure them. “The average diner in New York City is massively disadvantaged, and they don’t even know it,” Ben Leventhal, who co-founded the reservation site Resy and has created a new customer-loyalty app called Blackbird, told me. “It’s as if they’re bringing a knife to a gunfight.” It’s bleak out there if you’re trying to nab a tough reservation in New York. But it’s not impossible. Here are a few tips and tricks: - Go to Resy or OpenTable or a restaurant’s Web site a minute before reservations open up, two weeks before you want to eat out, then hit refresh over and over and over again and pray something appears.
- No luck? The bots probably beat you to it again. Now call the restaurant, though they’re probably not going to pick up.
- Signal to the owner that you’re ready to drop some serious coin: sign up for a fancy credit card that promises access to hot reservations; prepay for a bottle of Dom Pérignon on Dorsia, a members-only app that promises reservations in top American cities; or purchase a nineteen-million-dollar condo in a luxury building on Park Avenue, where a private concierge will try their best to hook you up.
- Buy a reservation on the secondary market! Just like scalper concert tickets—everyone’s doing it. Check out Cita Marketplace or Appointment Trader, to start. On Cita, a four-top for this Friday night at Ralph Lauren’s Polo Bar, one of the city’s toughest tables, goes for eight hundred dollars, before you even walk in the door. (You’ll need to remember to give the fake name that the seller used to make the reservation; the restaurateur will hate you for doing it, and you’ve still got to shell out for drinks, dinner, tip, tax, and maybe even dessert.)
- Befriend the maître d’—like, a real pick-you-up-at-the-airport friendship.
- If you do get in, remember that your server and sommelier are watching your every move, taking “guest notes,” and, if you’re lucky and also throwing around real money, labelling you as a “V.I.P.,” “P.P.X.,” (personne particulièrement extraordinaire), “reg,” “$$$$” or “W.W.” (wine whale) on their in-house system, guaranteeing you at least somewhat easier access the next time around.
- No matter how you get a table, remember to show up on time (restaurants are counting on you). Order a fun appetizer or a cool bottle of wine. Be kind to everyone. Tip extremely well. You’re supposed to be having fun!
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| A. J. Liebling famously wrote that “the primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite.” For this week’s digital Food Issue, we enlisted the appetites of chefs, novelists, New Yorker writers, and even a crew of very hungry babies. Like Liebling’s food writing, the resulting pieces offer pleasures both literary and epicurean, with generous sprinklings of humor and a few too many drinks. Today, the writer Alexandra Schwartz and the photographer Olaf Blecker capture the gloopy, gleaming mess that happens when babies rule the dinner table. Madhur Jaffrey reflects on the sweet-and-sour fruit of the tamarind tree. And our writers and staffers share fifteen of their all-time favorite cookbooks. Later this week, Helen Rosner follows Padma Lakshmi’s life after “Top Chef”; Gary Shteyngart takes a decadent Martini tour; Ina Garten shares her favorite secret ingredient; and much more. Enjoy! —Rachel Arons, editor | | | |
|  Illustration by Oliver Munday; Source Photographs: Jesse Grant / WireImage / Getty (McDougal); Mark Peterson / Redux for The New Yorker (Pecker); Jamie Squire / Getty (Trump); Lucas Jackson / Reuters (Howard) David Pecker, the former head of American Media, Inc., the publisher of the National Enquirer, took the stand today during Donald Trump’s hush-money trial in New York. Ronan Farrow has reported deeply on Pecker’s use of the “catch-and-kill” practice of buying and burying stories that were seen as harmful to Trump ahead of the 2016 election—including ones about a rumored love child and an alleged affair with the model Karen McDougal. On a recent episode of the Political Scene podcast, Farrow explained Pecker’s journey from Trump ally to coöperating witness. “He’s been someone who quickly gave up on that loyalty to Trump and that hope that he and his colleagues . . . could ride the Trump train all the way to the top. This is someone who has, at this point, fully turned whistle-blower.” | | | |
| P.S. “Baby Hour is not an official thing, but it is a real one.” Read Helen Rosner’s piece on why 5 P.M. is the perfect time for dining with children—and how some restaurants are working to make families feel welcome. | | | |
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