Why you can’t get a restaurant reservation

Reservations at New York's most in-demand restaurants have become hard to get, and a growing market of resellers now sells them for profit. Pete Wells, the Times critic who gave Sailor three stars, wrote that its reservations "disappear within minutes of being offered." Jonas Frey launched Appointment Trader in July 2021, a marketplace where people buy and sell reservations, and he said it cleared almost six million dollars in reservation sales over the past twelve months. Frey takes a twenty- to thirty-per-cent commission.