Blackbird's big loyalty play, revealed

The brand-new Blackbird Club grants special access to diners who show up and the employees who serve them.

Hello, Blackbird Club.

The loyalty and payments play from Resy founder Ben Leventhal, now CEO of Blackbird, is (finally) rolling out its promise of cross-restaurant loyalty and access. Blackbird Club, launched today, promises “a more satisfying thank you” to its members at partner restaurants like La Tête d’Or in New York and SPQR in San Francisco. Members get perks including priority access to reservations and other special events, plus guaranteed reservations at a small handful of restaurants. And as part of this initiative, Blackbird is offering specific and useful rewards to restaurant workers, a constituency that Leventhal says has traditionally been left out of the equation.

Blackbird entices its users to patronize restaurants — to show up, as they say — with $FLY, an in-house cryptocurrency that works a lot like credit card or airline points. Diners earn $FLY by tapping their phone on a puck to “check in” at certain spots, or by paying through the app. For the last six months or so, employees at Blackbird partner restaurants could earn $FLY by showing up at work and tapping in on an employee-specific, purple puck. Leventhal says that Blackbird has distributed more than 95 million $FLY to the restaurant industry, ostensibly keeping those funds inside the network.

For diners, membership in Blackbird’s club requires… a commitment. They commit either time — the lowest tier requires 25 restaurant check-ins at Blackbird’s restaurants; the highest, 50 or more — or money, depositing at least $5,000 worth of $FLY to be spent at its partner restaurants.

Blackbird Club Pro, the employees-only version that will launch in a few months, gives industry workers extra points for checking in at Blackbird restaurants, plus 20% off dining and five times the points for dining out on Monday and Tuesday — typically “industry night,” whether announced or unspoken — at participating spots. It’s a highly specific and intentional focus.

“We have to figure out what what matters the most and how to make sure that this group [of restaurant employees] is properly treated and compensated,” Leventhal told me in a recent interview. “I think rewards specifically for the industry are going to matter a ton.”

Blackbird, which has taken $85 million from tech-forward investors including a16z and Coinbase, wants to help us recapture a particular type of restaurant energy. Leventhal calls this “the magic of hospitality,” a phrase that, admittedly, reads a little precious. That so-called magic is a know-it-when-you-feel-it thing that’s proved historically tricky to capture with an app. But I get it.

Take, for example, the way that New Yorkers (and former New Yorkers) of a certain age responded last week when restaurateur Andrew Tarlow announced his category-defining Brooklyn restaurant, Marlow & Sons, would close. Social media (and our email inboxes) filled with remembrances and reminiscing and feelings about late nights or lazy afternoons at the bar; about drinking too much and eating too little; about finding a just-right restaurant within stumbling distance of home. “Have you checked on your elder millennials this week?” asked New York Magazine’s chief critic, Matthew Schneier in a Marlow eulogy of sorts. Clearly, plenty of us understand “the magic of hospitality.”

That’s the vibe that Blackbird’s chasing, in a handful of cities to start. It’s live in about 600 US restaurants, with a couple hundred more signed on, a comparatively small effort considering the 20,000 or so restaurants now listed on Resy, Leventhal’s previous company. But it’s a high-profile effort given its founder’s track record of helping to modernize restaurants, even if it sounds complicated to the uninitiated. (Blackbird maintains an extensive FAQ.) Similar to the idea of hospitality magic, restaurant people — the type willing to tap their phone on a puck for points and/or commit $5k to future spending — can sniff out a commitment to the cause.

I caught up with Leventhal ahead of today’s launch, where he further explained his motivations for the industry carve-out and also how his thinking about serving restaurants with good tech has evolved since the earliest days of Resy.

Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Expedite: Blackbird is a consumer app, but there’s this largely unseen industry side. Why target restaurant employees specifically?