Nick Kokonas Is Selling Tickets to Dinner

Nick Kokonas is standing at a giant whiteboard in his office above Next, one of three acclaimed Chicago restaurants he co-owns with chef Grant Achatz. Somewhat feverishly, he begins to chart out the current state of booking a table for dinner. “Reservations are predicated on two people lying to each other,” he begins. Good restaurants hedge bets on their availability, claiming they have fewer spots than they do. Patrons cancel for a host of fictitious reasons. Short of actually picking up the phone, the most popular method of scoring a reservation is OpenTable, an online platform that Kokonas says does well only because the company got into Internet reservations first. “It’s mind-numbing to me,” he says. “They earn money from leasing this antiquated technology.”

Since it began in 1998, OpenTable has grown to serve more than 32,000 restaurants, but the process—and those like it—is duplicitous. Request a same-day table on Yelp SeatMe for three at 7:30 at José Andrés’s latest D.C. restaurant, China Chilcano, and it comes up empty for prime-time spots. Pick up the phone, however, and the receptionist will happily book it in less than a minute. That’s because OpenTable, which was sold last year for $2.6 billion to Priceline Group, and its competitors charge restaurants a small fee (about $1 per seat) for each booking, so they’re better off keeping their top times to themselves—they’ll fill them just as easily without paying the fees. (OpenTable declined to comment for this story.)