After dozens of diners either canceled their reservations at Maketto or didn’t bother showing up at all, owner Erik Bruner-Yang lashed out at them on Twitter.
“Shout out to the 63 same day cancellations and the 14 no shows for supporting #SmallBusinessSaturday,” Bruner-Yang tweeted November 24.
Then on December 1: “91 same day cancellations, 24 no shows.”
Bruner-Yang estimates he lost thousands of dollars both days because people changed their minds. On December 1 alone, he says, patrons’ late cancellations or failure to show up cost him $4,000.
“We’re lucky we had some good walk-ins that night,” Bruner-Yang tells DCist of the 60-seat Cambodian and Taiwanese restaurant on the H Street corridor. “That made up for some of it, but we didn’t do the same numbers that we thought we’d do based on the reservations.”
Bruner-Yang knows he could charge finicky diners no-show or late-cancellation fees, but he has mixed feelings about that. He understands people’s plans change. If they’re traveling to D.C. for example, they may choose Maketto as one of several restaurants they want to try, but change their mind during their trip.
“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it, if that’s how you pick what you’re going to eat on a Friday night, as long as you’re proactive about canceling your reservation or making your mind up soon enough,” Bruner-Yang says of this approach, adding that he he has no plans to do without reservations altogether, as plenty of restaurants around town do.
Late cancellations and no-shows are a part of life for every restaurant that accepts reservations. But whether to take reservations or allow freedom for walk-in diners remains a tricky decision for restaurants to navigate—and for diners to accept.
“The two main things that people complain about are one, really loud restaurants and number two is the [lack of] reservations in restaurants,” says Jessica Sidman, food editor at Washingtonian. “It gets people really riled up if a place doesn’t take reservations and it’s really popular and they have to wait in line.”
Over her eight years covering the D.C. food scene, Sidman has found that people fall into one of two camps: the die-hard foodies who’ll wait in line for as long as it takes and eaters who think it’s utterly ridiculous to ever wait in line and refuse to do it.
For many years, that first camp won out. There were plenty of diners willing to pregame their dinners by waiting in line (or pay other people too wait for them). But now, a lot of people are fed up with standing in line.
“It became a thing in D.C.,” Sidman says of standing in line for hours on end, noting that Georgetown Cupcake was one of the first businesses people lined up for. “But I do think there’s been some backlash to it that more restaurants want to find ways to accommodate people, and even Rose’s Luxury has created some new options over the years so that people can book in advance.”
Now, the trend for restaurants has become accepting reservations to accommodate people who can’t spend hours waiting in line. They would include parents who don’t want to pay a babysitter or are too pressed for time to wait, people with physical restrictions that make it difficult for them to stand in line, patrons who don’t work flexible hours, and eaters who can’t afford to pay someone to wait in line for them, Sidman says.
Ellē co-owner Nick Pimentel found solidarity in Bruner-Yang’s tweets. After 30 people canceled their reservations on December 10, he too turned to Twitter.
https://twitter.com/EatAtElle/status/1072231008995545091
The 30 same-day cancellations brought a lot of pain to Ellē that night. While a few walk-ins showed up to claim some of the empty seats, Ellē wasn’t able to recover.
Pimentel sent two or three employees home early and the waitstaff still on the job earned fewer tips that night. On other occasions when this has happened, Pimentel has thrown out food.
Restaurants depend on head counts when it comes to staffing and food supply so when people don’t show up, that jeopardizes the entire operation.
“When I saw Erik’s tweet, that’s when it’s like, ‘Oh my gosh this is not just us, this is a problem with restaurants all over the city,'” says Pimentel, who reserves half of Ellē for walk-ins. “And yeah, it hurts the staff, it hurts the restaurant, it hurts the neighborhood.”
Same-day cancellations have been an ongoing issue at the Mount Pleasant bar, café, bakery, and restaurant since the beginning. So about a month or two after it opened earlier this year, Pimentel required people to turn over their credit card information before they made a reservation. That meant anyone who canceled their reservation within a 24-hour window or failed to show up faced a fee—Pimentel thinks it was $15. [Update: After this article was published, Pimentel confirmed that it was $20]
The policy helped some and staff noticed more and more people were keeping their reservations, but Pimentel also got an earful from angry callers about the fee, complaining that it was “ridiculous” and “not hospitable.” So he scrapped it about a month later and went back to letting diners book their reservations for free, a practice that continues today. Ironically, Pimentel admits he never actually charged guests if they failed to show up or canceled at the last minute.
“I think it was more of a scare tactic for guests,” he says.
He predicts more restaurants will move toward requiring a credit card to put down a reservation. If more restaurants ask for a credit card before booking a table, that’ll become the norm and “We might try that again,” Pimentel says.
He’s also considered opening Ellē to more walk-ins or taking the drastic step of not accepting reservations at all.
“We don’t want to do that,” he said. “We’re just trying to try different ways of taking reservations and in planning out seating grids and matrices just to see how we can solve this problem if it continues and hopefully, we can learn from talking to other restaurants.”
His other restaurant, Bad Saint, is another story: The 24-seat Filipino restaurant hasn’t accepted reservations since it opened in 2015. Foodies routinely stand in line for hours to get inside or hire people to do it for them.
“It’s a very special place for us and we’re glad people are lining up and doing it this way, we can get more people in a night,” he says. “More people can enjoy Bad Saint the way that it’s run.”
Pimentel says Bad Saint’s small size is what makes the team resistant to offering reservations: One or two no-shows is more detrimental to a small business than a big one. The smaller the restaurant, he says, the more dependent it is on getting people in to fill seats—and you need all of them to survive. But a larger eatery is more flexible on seating and often saves money by buying in bulk, he says.
Another popular restaurant of the same size, Petworth hotspot Himitsu, started accepting reservations about a month ago, says Carlie Steiner, one of the eatery’s co-owners.
When the 24-seat restaurant originally opened in 2016, it relied on a long line of walk-ins to ensure continuous seating. Reservations, meanwhile, can create up to a 30-minute gap between seatings, which Steiner says can be the difference between making or losing money.
“We really needed enough demand in order for us to be able to fill those spots when reservations don’t show up and they cancel,” Steiner says. “We can’t have people canceling. That’s really what’s going to hurt us.”
To protect themselves from lost costs, the Japanese-inspired restaurant requires a $25 deposit upfront from everyone in a party to hold the table. If everyone shows up, the restaurant subtracts the deposit from the bill. If not, the restaurant keeps it.
“That’s kind of our way of saying ‘We’re ready to accept reservations, but we can’t take the loss when you don’t show up,’” Steiner says, adding that in the few weeks since being implemented, the new system is going smoothly so far. “It’s just the only way that we could have made this a viable option for people at a 24-seat restaurant.”
Maydan co-owner Rose Previte made a conscious decision to accept reservations when she opened the trendy, 100-seat restaurant in the Manhattan Laundry development that specializes in Middle Eastern, North African, and Mediterranean cuisine, because she wanted it be a place where seniors and her friends with babies could also eat.
The year-old restaurant releases reservations on a rolling basis at midnight, 28 days in advance. Parties of six and under make reservations online and won’t face a cancellation fee if their plans change. For parties larger than six, diners email the restaurant directly for a reservation and put down a deposit based on expected sales for the table, Previte says.
Reservations are difficult to come by at Maydan, but the year-old eatery hasn’t experienced a night like Maketto, Previte says. When a reservation falls though, the restaurant turns to a steady stream of walk-ins to fill the spot at the 100-seat space.
Previte is happy with the reservation system, because it allows Maydan to accommodate lots of different guests. Still, as seems to be the case at many D.C. restaurants, not all to-reserve-or-not-to-reserve systems are perfect.
“Sometimes even though we have perfectly planned the night, one table will sit longer than expected and then the table after them has to wait,” Previte says via email. “Say we let a walk-in sit, but they stay longer than we expect and a table with a reservation comes in—that’s never good. We don’t want to ask the walk-in to get up, but we don’t want to upset the people who have a reservation. It’s always a balance.”
