It’s good to be Resy Notify

The product feature launched into infamy

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Where do all the reservations go? 

The New York Times answered this question via interactive feature on Wednesday, featuring one popular restaurant’s Thursday dinner service and a handful of its hundreds of nightly diners. 

For over a year, New York and national media have lamented the difficulties of getting in the door for dinner at any number of in-demand restaurants, hip or otherwise. Nearly all of them feature the same supporting character: Resy Notify, a product feature from the reservations company that creates a digital wait pool, alerting interested diners via push notification and email when a table opens up.

It’s been name-dropped in how-to-get-in features from Grubstreet and Katie Couric Media and Philadelphia Magazine and Delicious magazine in the UK and Food & Wine and Eater and the Infatuation and influencer blogs and Reddit threads and  lots and lots and lots of restaurant websites. 

It’s often described as a “hack” to win at the reservations game. Bad news, hackers: it’s mainstream now. 

A former boss once reprimanded me for covering too many new product features from tech companies. 

“That’s not news,” they said, “it’s a press release.”