Giuseppe Palmieri is used to diners slipping out of their reservations at Italy's three-Michelin-star Osteria Francescana without warning, but like many in the restaurant business, he has his stories. For example, there was the group of eight that had hired a limo service to drive them from Rome to the less heavily touristed Modena — about a four hour trip, give or take — for an 8 p.m. reservation at the restaurant. Though the group had confirmed their plans with Palmieri, he later heard from the limo driver that it was about halfway through the trip when the group asked to stop, tired and angry, not wanting to travel any further.
Obviously four hours is a long way to travel for dinner. But presumably these diners had made reservations weeks or even months ahead of time at the 11-table restaurant that is one of the highest ranked in the world. And given its location outside of Italy's main tourist hubs, there's not a lot of foot traffic nor is it easy to find people on the waiting list who are able to drop at minimum 110 euros ($144) on a set menu at the last minute. So those seats are likely to sit empty all night.
This holds true for restaurants everywhere, particularly in fine dining. Wylie Dufresne's New York City restaurant wd~50 has had nights where 25 covers were no-shows. Restaurant Gordon Ramsay in London deals with no-shows nearly every day. As head chef Clare Smyth says, "We all try to get into some of the best restaurants in the world and some people really genuinely and passionately want to eat there. I have a friend that was trying to get a table at French Laundry for weeks and weeks and he can't because it's fully booked. Isn't it sad when the people who book the table don't bother to turn up when someone like that genuinely wants to eat there?"
When Los Angeles restaurant Red Medicine took to Twitter in recent weeks to publicly shame diners who hadn't shown up for their reservations, it kicked up a debate that has simmered in restaurants for ages: what can be done about no-show customers. Here now, chefs and restaurateurs weigh in.
Not Taking Reservations or Limiting Reservations
Obviously the most effective of the options, a restaurant that doesn't take reservations at all can ensure that it won't be stood up by diners. Plenty of restaurants across the country can successfully manage a reservation-less system because they are white-hot in their cities, with long lines stretching out opening each night's opening hour such as at Washington, DC's Little Serow. But, as Dufresne points out, not taking reservations "is only effective if you're the flavor of the month." The average restaurant is not going to have that kind of devoted clientele that is willing to wait for an hour or more for a table.
Q&A With Nick Kokonas
[Photo: Gabe Ulla/Eater.com]
Do you see the ticketing system catching on?
For whatever reason, despite the fact that we've done it, everyone assumes, "Oh, they've done it, but they're the Alinea guys so they can do it. We're doing something different so we can't." I hear that a lot. "Oh, it's good for you guys because you're famous, but it's not going to work for us." As we slowly get more and more restaurants on, I think it's just so clear it's going to work for everybody. I just think more and more places are going to adopt it.
Until recently, Barley Swine in Austin, TX, was one of these reservation-less restaurants. General manager Jason James says the restaurant noticed that while the restaurant was slammed for most of the evening, things ran a little slower at 6 p.m. and at 9 p.m. And so Barley Swine very recently signed on with OpenTable to do limited reservations in hopes to fill up the dining room around the clock. Now, he says, about 40 of 120 covers a night are filled by reservations.
While it's too early in the switch to limited reservations to accurately estimate the effect, James says that Barley Swine now has had some no-shows, but that these are By the time Barley Swine gets to its second turn in the evening, between 8:30 and 9, its waiting list has grown long. "So, a no-show is a gift to those that are waiting," he says. "The no-shows in the beginning, they're annoying, but they're not make-it-or-break-it for us."
But while walk-ins might save Barley Swine from the no-show dilemma, other restaurants don't have that kind of foot traffic. Some restaurants are found in odd locations, while others are known as destination restaurants. Diners typically don't choose either of these options for their last-minute decisions and so walk-ins are an unlikely alternative for high-end or out-of-the-way restaurants.
Overbooking
There's a big difference between restaurants that rely solely on bookings and those that can accept walk-ins, says Nick Kokonas, co-owner of Chicago's Alinea, Next and The Aviary. Most restaurants have a choice between overbooking or booking to capacity — and, in the latter case, those that don't do big walk-in business are "destroyed" if people no-show. For example, he says, when Alinea —a destination restaurant by any definition — accepted reservations, two canceled tables meant the loss of 100 percent of the restaurant's profit for the evening. Overbooking as an airline might do could help ensure that a second diner is there to take over the table and mitigate the loss.
But, on the flip side, sometimes an evening's slate of diners do all show up for dinner. In that case, a restaurant has to deal with keeping guests waiting for tables that had been promised to them at a certain time. For many restaurants, this notion flies in the face of hospitality. Meshelle Armstrong says via email that her Alexandria, Virginia fine dining destination Restaurant Eve does not overcommit tables. After all, she writes, the restaurant doesn't want to ruin's someone's anniversary by kicking them out early to turn over the table. As she writes, "If we are lucky and we can count on our average dining time, maybe we will turn the table — twice."
Requiring Credit Cards and Contracts
Even though it holds three Michelin stars and is a major Italian destination restaurant, Massimo Bottura's Osteria Francescana struggles to deal with no-shows as well — three or four tables a week. "Imagine one table is empty, it means 10 percent of your money that you lost," general manager Giuseppe Palmieri recently told Eater. He's not allowed to charge the credit cards of no-shows, he says, but he sometimes bluffs and asks them for the information anyway. He won't use it, but it helps him weed out the diners who are not committed to their reservation.
Q&A With Wylie Dufrense
[Photo: wd~50]
How do you deal with no-shows at wd~50?
More than how we deal with it, I think it's important that people recognize how detrimental the concept of a no-show can be to a restaurant. I think it's curious what little recourse we actually have. If you don't show up for your dentist appointment and if you don't show up for your spa appointment, they're going to charge you.
Plenty of other restaurants can and do ask customers for their credits cards in advance on a regular basis and threaten them with cancellation fees if diners don't notify the restaurant within a certain window of time. London's three Michelin star Restaurant Gordon Ramsay has a policy that charges $225 per person for a late cancellation. "We have 41 members of staff to pay. We always have a full team and the produce is bought. It's a business to run at the end of the day," says head chef-patron Clare Smyth. "As I say, if we didn't have a cancellation policy, we would find that people wouldn't show up or people would book months out just in case, just to make sure they got a table and then they've got no need to turn up. They've got nothing to honor that."
Kokonas points out that Alinea once also had a cancellation fee of $100 per person within 24 hours of the reservation. But, he says, it didn't quite work out in the restaurant's favor. The same diners who would neglect to cancel in time, he says, would also place stops on their credit cards to prevent the cancellation fee from being paid. Smyth also finds that people who cancel on Restaurant Gordon Ramsay will sometimes evade the charges by canceling their credit cards (some of which carry insufficient funds anyway). "I want to emphasize this," Kokonas says. "The vast majority of customers don't do any of this. 95 percent of your customers show up or call well ahead to cancel and are super courteous and all that. But the 5 percent that aren't are kind of habitual about it.
And, of course, credit card companies tend to take the side of their customers rather than the vendors in disputes like this. Dufresne cites this as one of the advantages of reserving through OpenTable. At wd~50, he can make future diners sign an agreement that allows OpenTable to charge them for a canceled reservation. That said, Dufresne says that he'd "much rather have a deal with Visa where I could charge you through Visa. But to the best of my knowledge, Visa doesn't support that." Dufresne points out that while other industries — airlines, dentists and even the spa — have legal recourse to recoup no-show losses, the restaurant industry has very little legal recourse.
Tracking Prior Offenders
Though there may not be much he can do about it legally, Dufresne says wd~50 employees does note in the restaurant's database when people cancel — there are numerous repeated no-shows in that database, he says — and eventually will not accept reservations from those people any longer. But, he says, obviously those people could just use another person's name to get a reservation if they wanted. "So there's a work-around that any halfway intelligent person can figure out," Dufresne says. "We don't have your picture."
Online reservation portal OpenTable can help restaurants track no-shows and deal with the no-show problem in its own way. Ann Shepherd, senior vice president of marketing for OpenTable, explains that the reservation system takes note when a diner does not show up for a reservation. OpenTable will automatically send no-shows an email reminding them that they need to cancel reservations in the future, and, more interestingly, it will deactivate a user's account if four no-shows are recorded within a 12-month period. Beyond that, she says, OpenTable's entire system seeks to minimize the problem by sending users email confirmations and reminders about their reservations. All this might not stop no-shows, but it does provide a helpful way of tracking them.
Kokonas said Alinea also kept track of repeat cancellations before it transitioned over to tickets, and that there were some people who dined at Alinea once but canceled on it 14 times. "Do you want to take that booking then?" he asks. "Does it even mean anything if they book? Of course not."
Pre-Paid Ticketing Systems
It was these such frustrations that prompted Kokonas to develop a whole new restaurant reservation system when he and Achatz opened Chicago's ever-changing concept that is Next. He says it was driving him "fairly nuts" to see so many cancellations and know that overbooking wasn't an option and that charging credit cards might not work. So, he says, he dreamed up the restaurant's ticketing system:
Pretty much everybody I talked to in the industry and even our own staff thought I was completely nuts. I don't want to say the name of the person, but a really famous New York restaurateur who owns tons of restaurants looked at me in the eye and said, "You'll never sell a ticket to a restaurant. It's anti-hospitality." And I was sitting there going like, "Well, I buy tickets to concerts and if I no-show a concert, the concert goes on and I have my ticket. I don't call them up and say, "Hey, cancel the concert for me" or whatever it is. Tickets and variable pricing just seemed to make sense to me.
The Next/Alinea ticketing system displays all the tables that are available in the restaurant — a transparency of inventory that Kokonas believes has a positive psychological effect on diners who know they're not being lied to about availability — and prices primetime tables higher than those at, say, Wednesday night at 10 p.m. "The two would equal each other out," Kokonas explains. "Your check average would be the same, but you'd even out the demand across all your days and times and you'd eliminate no-shows." And even if someone does no-show, the restaurant already has their money. Diners looking to cancel can also sell their tickets online like sports fans do using sites like StubHub.
While ticketing worked for Next and Alinea — Next alone sold $3 million worth of season tickets within a couple of hours for two years in a row — other restaurateurs remain skeptical. Dufresne and Smyth each agreed that Kokonas' system is a great idea, but that they aren't sure they can see it working in either New York City or the UK, respectively. "I think it's a different ballgame in Chicago versus New York, and I'm not so sure that New Yorkers would settle for being forced to pay in advance," Dufresne says. "I think you'd get a lot of people saying, 'Oh really? There's 20,000 restaurants for me to choose from. Thanks, but I'll go somewhere else.' Unless we all agree to do it, it's just going to be tough."
Meanwhile, Restaurant Eve's Meshelle Armstrong also says she understands why other people might go down this route, but that ticketing isn't for her, writing, "I guess I am old school. As far as 'tickets' I myself do not like the system or even the name of it ? the romance is taken away from dining. But that's me. I like to still talk to people and hear a voice ? when you have someone on the phone, you really get to know who's coming to dinner. People show you who they are just by how they make a reservation. Then you know what to expect from them and you can perform to suit who is dining. Once you sell them a ticket to dinner, you lose that personal touch."
Kokonas has heard all these arguments before. He points out that his restaurants do call everyone who has successfully purchased a ticket in order to keep that personal touch — and, he says, the ticketing means the restaurant isn't spending all its time on the phone with people who will not be dining there. Kokonas even sees one of the system's drawbacks as a strength: "There have been some people that have said to me, 'I'll never come to your restaurant because I have to buy a ticket.' And I go, 'Awesome.' Because the person basically just told me, 'I could never make a commitment to going a certain night and I cancel all the time.' So I've just eliminated exactly the person I want to eliminate."
As to whether this might work outside of Chicago, Kokonas says he's gotten a lot of interest in commercializing the ticketing system, with unnamed restaurants in Canada and Europe expected to roll it out sometime soon. And it might even work for more casual a la carte places. In the coming months, The Aviary will move over to a similar system in which drinkers and diners can prepay $25 for a ticket and then have that amount credited to their bill. The system would even potential offering a discount on off hours with diners paying $10 to get a $20 credit. "As we slowly get more and more restaurants on, I think it's just so clear it's going to work for everybody," Kokonas says. He says he's amazed that more of the insanely busy Chicago restaurants he loves haven't copied his system yet, but noted, "I guess for them it doesn't feel as broken as it does for a small restaurant."
Public Shaming
One final method of dealing with no-show diners is actually one that's a little more about restaurateurs venting their frustrations: shaming. Just as LA's Red Medicine garnered national headlines for naming its no-shows on Twitter, the Noma staff in Copenhagen got some attention months back when they posted — and later deleted — a photo on Twitter giving the finger to diners who had stood up the world's top-ranked restaurant.
And sometimes the shaming is done more privately. Dufresne says his restaurateur father Dewey Dufresne "has been known to call people late at night who haven't shown up hours after their reservation — and well after they closed — say, "Hey, we're still holding a table for you. Should we let it go?'" New York City chef André Soltner famously did the same as chef at Lutece. According to the New York Times, it was something Soltner never regretted.
While shaming customers might feel great, it's obviously not a very effective way of stemming the no-show problem. Kokonas says he understands how restaurateurs can reach a boiling point where calling out no-shows seems like a good option. But, he says, "I don't know that's what you want to do because you might instill some fear in your good customers. As I said, 5 percent of the people cause the problems for everybody else. What you really want to do is just eliminate those people."
And Dufresne says he's "not interested in some sort of jihad against people who don't show up." He wouldn't call out his no-shows, he says, but wishes the media would do more to explain to diners that what might seem like no big deal is actually a serious hit to a restaurant's bottom line. And even if they're charging $100 a head, these restaurants are still just small businesses with slim profit margins. "t's something I think is shameful. People should really feel bad when they fail to call and they don't show up," he says. "Just call. That's all I'm saying. Just call. You're affecting people in a negative way that are just trying to scrape by to begin with."
