Diners are impatient. They may fume when waiting for food at restaurants and get angry when they call and cannot book reservations.
But they don’t patronize only restaurants that take reservations.
Dining-guide publisher Tim Zagat says a customer’s mood often decides what kind of restaurant is chosen and determines how good the restaurant is at moving people in and out, regardless of reservation policy.
Take, for two examples, New York City restaurants Lupa, a Mario Batali-Joe Bastianich operation that takes reservations, and The Spotted Pig, a popular gastropub that doesn’t. Both are always full.
Then there’s upscale-casual chain The Cheesecake Factory.
“We have never taken reservations in 30 years and never intend to,” says Howard Gordon, senior vice president of business development and marketing.
The Cheesecake Factory has 139 restaurants, each of which averages 2,500 meals served per day and offers an 18-page menu with 200 items and about 50 desserts, of which 40 are cheesecakes. The units range in size from 5,400 square feet to 21,000 square feet and post average annual sales of $11 million.
Yet despite such results, the practice of taking reservations at restaurants has survived the trend in recent decades toward a “casualization” of foodservice protocols. Reservations also are managing to survive in spite of diners’ growing appetites for unstructured meal occasions and spur-of-the-moment decisions about where to eat.
A recent Cornell University study, “Customer Satisfaction with Seating Policies in Casual-Dining Restaurants,” made the point that more than half of the respondents would not consider a restaurant for a business meal if they could not make a reservation.
But Gordon takes exception to the Cornell findings, published by its Center for Hospitality Research in Ithaca, N.Y.
In Cheesecake Factory’s case it’s simply “not true” that customers stay away because reservations aren’t accepted, Gordon says.
How customers choose restaurants is a multifaceted process.
“In general, speed wins,” says Ron Paul, president of Technomic Inc., a restaurant consulting and research firm in Chicago.“[As customers,] we are less tolerant than we used to be when discussing upscale-casual restaurants and the chains. We are a little inconsistent. We stand in line at Starbucks, but at McDonald’s we want it now. We don’t want slow food in a fast-food restaurant.”
Some restaurants are beginning to use third parties to take reservations. OpenTable.com, one of the dominant players in the online-reservations arena, operates in eight countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, Mexico, Spain, Germany, France and Canada. OpenTable-affiliated restaurants serve more than 2 million guests each month through reservations booked through the San Francisco-based company’s website.
OpenTable serves more than 8,000 restaurant customers in 47 states and the District of Columbia. Reservations are immediately confirmed when using the service.
“Restaurantgoers are becoming more sophisticated and are expecting more from their reservations for hotels and airline tickets experience,” says Liz Johannesen, OpenTable Inc.’s senior manager of restaurant marketing.
When restaurants handle their own reservations, inefficiencies result because of high turnover at the host stands, Johannesen adds. The OpenTable network continues to grow, not just in larger cities but also in markets like Indianapolis and Orlando, Fla., where the service has seen triple-digit growth, she says.
Diners who make reservations through OpenTable.com do not pay a fee. However, there is an installation fee for restaurants of $1,200 and a monthly service fee of $200 for hardware, software training, maintenance and call support. In addition, there is a $1 fee for each reservation that comes through the OpenTable website and a 25-cent charge payable to OpenTable for reservations made through a restaurant’s own website.
OpenTable also has a dining incentive program in which restaurants provide discounts to consumers who book reservations at particular times or on specific days that the restaurant prefers.
Another online-reservation startup, the Magellan Network, was established in 2006.
“Our focus is to help restaurants become more operationally effective and maximize their return on investment,” say Chris Poelma, Magellan’s chief operating officer.
Magellan expects to have full national coverage by midsummer in all 50 states. The company intends to evaluate international markets during 2008.
There is no charge to consumers. Restaurants do not have to buy hardware or software. There is a monthly subscriber fee that is “less than a daily cup of coffee at your local Starbucks,” Poelma says. Once the restaurant is registered and the monthly fee is paid, the restaurant can use the Table Management System, says Magellan’s director of marketing, Yann Ropars.
Consumers can make reservations at the restaurants’ websites or through online links to Magellan provided by such organizations as Zagat.com, dineLA.com, the Newport Beach Restaurant Association, Savvy Diner and Your Restaurant Connection.
Magellan expects to use a central website in the future. About 2,800 restaurants have signed up for the service, which also offers a loyalty program enabling restaurants to offer discounts on certain days and hours to attract consumers.
Often, large, multiunit restaurant groups have different methods for taking reservations for different sections of their restaurants. The Union Square Hospitality Group, whose New York concepts include Union Square Café, Gramercy Tavern, Eleven Madison Park and Tabla, is one such company.
Gramercy Tavern takes reservations for its dining room but not for its tavern area.
“The Tavern is not a formal dining experience,” says Richard Coraine, chief operating officer of the Union Square group. “It’s impromptu, come as you are. Our goal is to give you great food and great hospitality.”
Coraine says his restaurants give frequent updates on the approximate time before a reservation comes up.
All the tables in Tabla’s main dining room are available for reservations, but its Bread Bar area, which serves lunch and dinner, takes reservations only for about one-third, about 20, of its tables.
In Eleven Madison Park, reservations are taken in the main dining room, but not in its lounge, although it does occasionally book small parties there. By accepting reservations the lounge would lose its open, “dropin” appeal for guests, he says.
At Union Square Café, only the bar and three tables are set aside for drop-in diners.
However, several chains that have switched to taking reservations indicate that customers are not responding.
Irvine, Calif.-based Claim Jumper, whose casual-dining restaurants have the reputation of notching per-location sales averages second only to The Cheesecake Factory’s, had maintained a first-come, first-served policy until it added a phone-ahead wait-listing service and, recently, began accepting conventional reservations.
Larry Bill, the 44-unit chain’s director of community affairs and public relations, says that switch was made because families and businesspeople would benefit.
“Families are our core customer group, parents and small children,” he says. “It’s hard when you get a family together at a restaurant and have to wait.”
Businesspeople also wanted to come to the restaurants for meetings, and that was inconvenient without reservations.
Though usage so far has been gradual, customers now can book tables through Claim Jumper’s website in most markets in Arizona, California, Illinois, Nevada, Oregon and Washington, and they can call the individual restaurants.
P.F. Chang’s China Bistro, based in Scottsdale, Ariz., started taking reservations about three years ago in order to attract customers who may have stopped eating at the restaurants because their wait times tended to be long. Sources at the chain say many diners still tend to make spur-of-the-moment decisions to visit P.F. Chang’s units.
Even relatively new restaurants are using reservations to build their clientele. Tom Brunnberg, president and chief operating officer of BrickTop’s, recently began taking reservations through the Nashville, Tenn.-based chain’s website. As the four BrickTop’s casual-dining restaurants—in Nashville, Atlanta, Charlotte, N.C., and Naples, Fla.—had opened since the concept debuted in 2006, they had been taking reservations over the phone.