As the daughter of a foodie father, I’ve had the Yelp app downloaded since the second I got my first rose gold iPhone SE in 2014. While he’s the type of Gen X to leave the occasional scathing review, I was the type of “Yelper” who created collections of restaurants in cities that I had no plans to visit. Honestly, if you were to collect data from my dad and my iMessage conversations and analyze what percent of links we send each other are Yelp pages, I think the results would be staggering. Call us crazy – we probably deserve it.
While I’ve been making reservations practically since I could walk, I only started doing it for sport two summers ago, and I’m proud to say that I think I’ve mastered my craft. While my Yelper identity is forever, in the grand scheme of reservation wars, Yelp is mere child’s play. So if you, like me, are a foodie who lives for the thrill of securing the hottest table in town – this one’s for you.
Let’s go back to Manhattan circa 2022, the tail end of my gap year: all the restaurants are opening back up with extra outside seating, New Yorkers are back on their quotidian dining grind, and meanwhile, I’m a single gal out on the town working forty hours a week but still somehow having a little too much free time on my hands – a combination that undoubtedly did wonders for Resy corporate. As I started observing all the New Yorkers around me dabbling in their own table-booking madness, I couldn’t help but immerse myself in the culture of reservation wars too.
Where did I start, you might ask? Resy. If you’re not familiar with the app, it is one of the main online restaurant-reservation services that boasts over 16,000 restaurants globally – essentially a foodie’s dream app. And even if you’re more of the OpenTable type, I think we can all agree that there’s something about Resy’s “Notify” feature that makes it so much more enticing.
I picked up the Manhattanites’ affection for the “Notify” feature astoundingly quickly, and before I knew it, I had several alerts set, all within the time frame of a whopping 5:00 PM to midnight, for some of the most unattainable New York reservations. The main challenge, of course, being the ever-iconic and almost ironically exclusive, Carbone.
While we could have extensive discourse about whether it’s actually Carbone’s food or rather, its glittery, star-studded renown that makes it such an experience, as soon as I got the notification that a table had opened up, it was like Christmas morning. So, the night before I left the city to return home, I celebrated my New York chapter coming to a close by treating myself to a special Carbone dinner. It was picture perfect.
But, I must include a brief PSA for anyone looking to get their very own spicy rigatoni fix: head on over to Parm. Parm is owned by the same Food Group and has the exact same pasta at a much more reasonable price!
Flash forward to Summer 2023, when I’m back in the city and curiously on a blind, double Hinge date with my best friend, and our dates have introduced me to the app, Beli. Perhaps unfortunately for them, but fortunately for me, this app discovery was undoubtedly the highlight of my night.
Founded by a foodie couple who met in NYC after college, the Beli app to them was “a solution that allowed food lovers to consistently find and track the best restaurants.” And to me, it is just that. This app has completely changed my reservation game and has also made this hobby of mine a social endeavor.
On Beli, you can create lists of restaurants, bars, bakeries, coffee shops, and dessert spots that you want to try, and you can also rate them by doing a review. After completing your review, Beli has an algorithm that compares the restaurant you just rated to similar ones that you have visited before, and it makes you choose which one you liked best until it assigns the restaurant a number rating (on a 0-10 scale) and its spot on your “Been” list. For example, based on my review, Carbone New York has a 9.8 rating and holds spot #5 on my list. All of these ratings are then placed onto a map where you can view every spot you’ve reviewed. The reviews you complete are also shared with your friends in the “Feed” section, where you’re able to like and comment on their content, too.
The best feature, however, is the reservation sharing option. You can share reservations that you can’t attend on the app so other users can claim them, and your “Reservation Priority Level” is based on how many successful invites to friends you send. Here, you can find a number of competitive reservations that people are graciously willing to share. This feature is how I landed a reservation at Misi, which now holds the #1 spot on my Beli list where it boasts my only 10.0 rating.
If you’ve found that you may need some help in the rizzservation department, fear not, because once you embrace the dynamic duo that is Beli and Resy, you’ll never have to flirt with the restaurant’s host for a table again. But with power comes great responsibility, as with these new found skills you’re practically guaranteed to turn into what I like to call, “the reservation friend.”
While “the reservation friend” will always find themselves tasked with the Olympic sport of choosing the setting for the next girls night out, I promise that they’ll never get tired of receiving that long-awaited, “You’re due in 30 minutes,” text from a random six digit phone number that you first assume is spam. But the cherry on top is that sometimes “the reservation friend” will receive such a questionable amount of reminder texts, that Resy starts seeming like the person they told you not to worry about…
As both a “reservation friend” and a foodie, there is something so healing about picking out a fabulous restaurant to go to with some fabulous friends. After growing up watching Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda, and Samantha of Sex and The City parade around New York attending restaurant opening after restaurant opening, including numerous attempts to bribe the hostess at “Balzac,” it seems only fitting that I too have found solace and serendipity in working some of my own reservation magic. And while I might not be able to get a table at Carbone as easily as Drake, I sure have more fun trying.