How to Snag a Reservation at That Oh-So-Popular Restaurant

It's pay day here at the blog this week. The reason is that nothing registers on the ol' Hate-O-Meter quite as high as the dining woes of the rich, especially of aspiring socialites and actresses  and plastic surgeons (who post before and after pictures of rhinoplasties but not their regurgitated three-Michelin-star food). The Your Money section (emphasis added) helpfully chronicles how the rich spend our money on the most frivolous things. It's trickle-up economics at its best.

Like the Bard said, "It's hard for a pimp out here." When can one show off that latest round of Botox treatments at a prime location on the Upper East Side? Well, it really depends if you're merely rich. Shockingly, not every snobby restaurant caters to those who've only acquired massive wealth. These are the very trials and tribulations of one Cassandra Seidenfeld, she of the multiple websites, which tells you we're clearly not dealing with just any self-promoter here. If anyone could get into Polo Bar, it would be someone with an equestrian section on her personal website, right? WRONG!!!

Not content simply to describe the supply-and-demand dynamic of five-star restaurants in New York on any given night, i.e., 50 tables, 10,000 assholes, aspiring journalist Paul Sullivan delves into the emotional complexity of the merely rich's outsider status. Mr. Sullivan paints a nuanced portrait of Ms. Seidenfeld's psyche, plumbing the dark waters of how being refused a reservation has made her feel:

“I’d call and they’d say ‘We have a waiting list that lasts months,’ ” Ms. Seidenfeld said. “No one in New York wants to wait months. I had friends who were posting that they were in the restaurant, which made me ballistic.”

Ba-llis-tic. The last time I felt ballistic was when George W. Bush was reelected president TJ's stopped carrying the caramelized onion pizza. But different strokes, different folks, y'know? Still, you never know where a helping hand will come from and Ms. Seidenfeld appears humbled, if we may be so bold as to use that word here, by where she found it:

She mentioned her frustration to her personal shopper at Ralph Lauren on Fifth Avenue, around the corner from the restaurant, and he offered to call on her behalf. A day later, she was dining there with a friend. 

“I was shocked by the power of my personal shopper,” she said.

It is a great joy when you learn that the proletarian still have something to offer their masters, other than their very souls, even if it is only to gain access to the place where the even bigger masters rub shoulders. Still, in life, timing is everything. And this is no less true for dinner reservations that are harder to get than Swiss citizenship:

For starters, adjust your expectations. Everyone wants to have lunch at 12.30 p.m. and dinner on a Saturday at 8 p.m. Chances are the other diners calling are just as affluent, willing to spend and unknown as you. 

But even hip restaurants need to pay the bills, and that means early and late seatings for the non-A-list crowd. Michael Ridard, partner at Bâoli, a fashionable Miami Beach restaurant, said someone who wanted to eat at his restaurant should aim for 7 p.m. and forget trying to get a 9:30 p.m. reservation, when the restaurant will be filled with A-listers and a D.J. spinning music.

Horrid as it might seem the merely rich might just have to be content to eat before 7 p.m. What is this, Boca Raton? Not only that, but restaurants are capitalizing on their seating arrangements and leaving the best spots for those who can afford upholstery of human skin or something:

While [Jason Apfelbaum] said the average affluent person had no chance of getting one of the 14 seats at the center of the restaurant, which will feature a Tokyo-style cabaret, there are 58 additional seats in the main room and 53 more in a lounge (in other words, the less cool area).

It is perhaps no wonder then that in Ms. Seidenfeld's interminable and quotable LinkedIn profile she writes at the very top of her professional summary, "Goal = an OSCAR." This is without any apparent irony--one of these basic concepts in ars dramatic that seem to bedevil poor Ms. Seidenfeld during her training at the William Esper Studio.

Not all hope is lost, though. There are still those generous and reliable souls who listen when money talks:

Abraham Merchant, president and chief executive of Merchants Hospitality, said he typically held a private room at his restaurant Philippe in Manhattan for celebrity clients but would open it up to diners who commit to ordering an expensive wine or spending well on the meal. 

“Sometimes, people will order a bottle of Château Lafite ahead of time — you’ll get the room then,” he said. “If they’re going to spend $10,000, we’ll give them the room.”

And we still have friends in this town, thank God. Dr. Weintraub uses his famous patients to get him reservations when they stay at the Pierre Hotel: 

“They often have access that a civilian, even a plastic surgeon, might not have,” Dr. Weintraub said.

And here I was thinking that getting into Chipotle at noon was the worst of my headaches.

A merely rich person wonders when she'll get her next $1,000 dinner