These Restaurants Have Ditched Reservation Apps

When Tina Vaughn opened Eulalie, the intimate French American restaurant in Tribeca she runs with her husband, chef Chip Smith, she set up her reservation system thoughtfully. She connected her landline. She arranged her new pencils in a glass. She set her reservation book next to her old Rolodex, crowded with creased cards. She began to answer the phone and write down reservations in neat script with personalized notes — this customer takes Famous Grouse on the rocks; she likes mezcal in her margarita, and so on.

Oh, and if you’re wondering, Eulalie opened in 2023, not in 1980.

Vaughn is a throwback, eschewing apps like Resy and OpenTable, and even Instagram, rewinding to Luddite days of landlines and hulking reservations books, where connections grew from conversations, not clicks. “A decade ago, refusing to take online reservations put them in a distinct minority,” Pete Wells wrote in his review of Eulalie for the New York Times. “Today it makes them seem like members of an isolated religious sect.”

Vaughn and Smith have never used reservation technology; whether at the Simone, the modern American restaurant they ran in a townhouse on the Upper East Side until 2022, or at their previous restaurants, Carolina Blue and Bonne Soiree, in North Carolina. The pair are steeped in tradition, veterans of legendary restaurants like Palladin, the Inn at Little Washington, and An American Place. “It’s what we have always done,” Vaughn said. “If people are annoyed, they have many other places to go to.”

At Eulalie, her relationship to her customers begins with her voicemail message, where she sounds more like a bestie than a serious restaurateur. “This is Tina, of Tina and Chip, loving the fact that you are coming down to enjoy dinner with us,” she says. “When joining us here at Eulalie, we do so appreciate a little swanky dress; think more Todd Snyder and Mad Men and less GrubHub and pizza. Leave me a message and I will call you back.” And she will.

While some may roll their eyes at the idea of making a phone call to speak to a real person for a reservation, Vaughn says customers are happy to find a human on the other end of a phone line.

“People are almost starving for that human connection,” Vaughn said. In a world where a machine is used to instantly access everything from dinner to dish soap, there are advantages — and costs — to tech. OpenTable runs between $149 and $499 per month for a restaurant, plus a per-person reservation fee that varies depending on the plan, from 25 cents (from the restaurant site) to $1 (from the OT site).

Yet it comes with firepower. “OpenTable equips restaurants with the tools that pen and paper simply can’t do alone such as filling seats, driving loyalty and repeat guests, and delivering personalized hospitality,” OpenTable CEO Debby Soo answered via email.

While Eulalie is an outlier, operators like the Polo Bar and a handful of others are moving in this direction, adopting a hybrid model, using apps like Tock, Seven Rooms, Resy, or OpenTable to schedule reservations, then transferring reservations to a book before service. At Cafe Carmellini, the team transfers all reservations to a leather tome, bound by hand by storied bookmaker Henry Alpert. “We said, ‘Henry, make it look like Dumbledore would use it,’” said chef and partner Andrew Carmellini. “And that’s what it looks like.”

Evan Sung/Cafe Carmellini

The wizardry and elegance of a Hogwarts tome dovetails with the magic of the restaurant, located in the Fifth Avenue Hotel in Nomad, where tables are draped in white linens and captains don bowties. “This is our most elegant restaurant,” Carmellini said. “Even though it’s a massive extra step, aesthetically, not having someone on a screen sets the tone.”

Chase Sinzer, an owner of Claud, the French-influenced restaurant in the East Village, also transfers reservations by hand to a London-made Aspinal book. Sinzer was inspired to use a book after seeing one at Balthazar. “It was warm and felt genuine,” he said. “Anything you can do to add one more percent of warmth versus the computer-fication of the process is helpful.”

Keith McNally, the owner of Balthazar — which often does 1500 covers on a weekend night — continues to keep a book. While the process of writing hundreds of names in the book is time-consuming, McNally says it’s worth it.

“A well organized book works just as competently as a computer screen,” he said. “But so what if it doesn’t? Isn’t it worth losing a little efficiency to make things more personable? It’s a bloody restaurant, after all!”