Last week, London restaurant St John began taking reservations for its 30th anniversary celebration. For most of September, the Smithfield restaurant will be serving its 1994 menu at 1994 prices. Tables were snapped up in minutes, maybe seconds. I sat at my computer, refreshing the OpenTable reservations page like a monkey on a slot machine, and got nothing but a manic rush of adrenaline that ruined my morning.
I saw the algorithm create Soviet bread lines overnight
Please, dear reader, don’t feel sorry for me – it was just a minor inconvenience, of course. What really upsets me is the principle: fun now has to be carefully planned and booked weeks in advance. Most restaurants in the capital seem to be booking their tables by reservation only and not allowing spontaneous guests, and people have adapted their social lives accordingly.
I can’t really remember what life was like before the pandemic, but isn’t that a legacy of that anxious way of living, planning and stockpiling that I thought we agreed made us deeply unhappy? We haven’t returned to normality when we schedule an hour-and-a-half dinner date with friends four weeks in advance. Living like this has the same grim bureaucracy as scheduling a Zoom call.
A few months ago, I realised I might have what the books you buy in a WHSmith airport would call a “scarcity mentality”. This mentality kept my caveman ancestors alive, but causes me to get sweaty palms even when I go to Nando’s without writing in first. I often sit on the bus staring into space, imagining an endless queue, a “sold out” sign, someone snatching the last table just before I arrive. That’s certainly not the way to live, especially in a time of plenty, but the odds are increasingly stacked against me – online reservations on OpenTable are 9 per cent higher than they were before the pandemic (you can now make an OpenTable reservation directly from TikTok).
Even if you reserve in advance, you’ll often be assigned a time slot. I know that dining is both an art and an industry and that restaurants try to free up tables as quickly as possible, but getting a bill and being asked to vacate a table can be dehumanizing. Restaurants are supposed to be one of the few places where you can exchange money for goods and leave without feeling like a slave to consumerism.
This practice seems to be spreading. Last summer I walked eight miles to a pub in the Cotswolds (my stupid mistake in thinking that other Londoners wouldn’t play pawn there too). When I arrived, the clientele seemed strangely familiar: twenty-somethings in oversized Ganni shirts, scrunchies and Adidas Sambas, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes with their friends wearing hoop earrings. Starving, covered in prickles and burrs, I hoped against hope. They were fully booked. The yuppies had come to town. And yes, I know I’m one of them, but let’s be honest. I had walked eight miles, not just driven there in my Prius. How can a pub in a village of no more than a few hundred people be fully booked?
We’re at least lucky to have been spared the reservation disaster of New York, where bots and black marketeers snap up tables as soon as they become available and resell them at exorbitant prices. One black marketeer made $70,000 (about £53,000) last year by selling tables through the third-party website Appointment Trader. But where America leads, Britain will surely follow.
Like many of the world’s ills, we can blame social media. London’s fancy bakeries are lawless places where I’ve seen the algorithm create Soviet bread lines overnight, young people staying home on Friday nights so they can get up early and join a line – all because a man called Eating With Tod made a TikTok about a grotesque and dripping monster doughnut.
These queues are mostly civilised, but I’m not sure I ever recovered from the great toilet paper panic of 2020. Those apocalyptic scenes of people clearing supermarket shelves have reassured me that in a real doomsday scenario, they would have no qualms about sacrificing me on an altar of toilet paper. So, despite my protests, these days I can only find peace of mind with the safety of an online booking – in other words, by succumbing to the death of spontaneity. It’s a noble act to try to resist and stay under the Resy radar, but be warned in advance – you’re signing up for a hunger strike.
