The status reservation has moved from dinner to the middle of a Wednesday, and the long lunch is now the harder table to get.
Dinner got bot-gated and resold (Appointment Trader flipped around 7 million dollars of bookings before New York banned the practice), so the real flex became the one thing a scalper cannot sell you: a schedule loose enough to vanish for two hours at lunch.
- OpenTable found Wednesday seated diners up 11 percent, the biggest jump of any weekday; CEO North America, citing OpenTable, puts New York midday dining up 17 percent year on year.
- The food columnist Ed Cumming says restaurateurs tell him the big midweek lunch is "really on the up at last."
- Read honestly, it signals autonomy, not taste: only people who control their own time can do it.
Keep the leisure, bin the performance.
