Skift Take
A full restaurant is great for business, but too full can be off-putting. Striking the right balance between walk-ins and reservations is crucial to success, but it's not easy.
The world of dining out can often come down to one thing — getting a table. Reservations at the restaurant of moment are often booked months in advance, and walk-ins, if even set aside, tend to be risky undertakings that can involve spending hours sipping expensive cocktails, hunger pangs growing more aggressive, while waiting for a table to open up.
Orchestrating that delicate balance between reservations and walk-ins is an art form, and a subject that occupies many of the waking (and sleeping) hours of the front of house teams charged with managing the book. Should all tables be set aside for reservations? Is it best to have a 50-50 mix? Or should it be somewhere in between, depending on the lifespan of the restaurant? What exactly is the right formula, one that ensures walk-ins and regulars can find a spot, and reservations are plentiful enough so that potential diners searching online are not lost to the competition. As with many issues in the restaurant industry, the answer is, well, complicated.
Bill Chait, the prolific LA restaurateur behind the newly-opened Tesse, the 125-seat hot-spot he opened with Creative Artists Agency, said the way to approach this complex equation is to view reservations as inventory. “The classic protocol is to leave bar seats for walk-ins, and to hold back a few more tables for friends and regulars, and put the rest of your inventory out for reservations on OpenTable or Resy. If you run out of inventory, you lose those people swimming around in these networks.”
Chait said this is especially important because diners’ habits have changed lately; most are booking tables not a week or a month in advance but a few hours before dinner. “It used to be that people planned ahead, but now they just go on their app and look up what tables are available that night. If you don’t have inventory out there, then you can’t meet that demand. If you want to drive people to your restaurant in the last 24 hours, or even five hours, yo
