Frank Bruni Goes Ko-razy
New York Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni is frustrated at the reservation process at Momofuku Ko, the impossible-to-get-into pork-injected haute-cuisine spin-off of David Chang's Momofuku empire in New York. The place has 12 seats and employs a web-based reservation system that requires you to log in at 10 a.m. for seats a week out.
It's egalitarian in theory, and I admire Chang and company for subjecting everyone—VIPs and schlubs alike—to the same miserable experience of signing on and viewing a series of little red Xs indicating you're hosed. Supposedly, the place does not play favorites. Still, as level as the playing field is, there've been complaints about logging on, seeing a green checkmark, clicking on it, but then being told that, No, someone else just nicked that spot.
In frustration, one of Bruni's readers contacted the place for an explanation, was schooled on "the way in which the internet works," and then gets into an exchange with the Ko-mputer dude. Comments on the exchange have pork-loving geeks speculating on ways that Web 2.0 tools could help improve the system. As it is, Bruni's crusading reader writes, "you may as well just have a total lottery system, where you email the server each day and it blurts out a few dozen names of people who have tables."
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3 Comments:
It's quite clear that the solution is for anyone who wants one of these reservations to outsource it to a personal assistant.
The LATimes (I could only find a link to the Trib) did an article about how you can hire a virtual personal assistant from India to do things that require webwork or phone calls. They could totally sit there and refresh the page for you:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-india-personal-assistant-feb05,0,4378629.story
cybele at 7:40PM on 04/03/08
There was something about the whole outsourcing thing on Mahalo Daily last week. This guy who wrote a book about how he does a 4-hour work week, and basically outsources pretty much everything, including having his email read by some woman in India. Crazy stuff.
But enough complaining about the Momofuku Ko reservations already! Even if he doesn't outsource to India he could at least grab an intern to take care of getting him a reservation.
ppohio at 9:18AM on 04/04/08
You could always use Amazon's Mechanical Turk and have hundreds of otherwise unemployed street urchins bang on the....wait, they're getting better publicity by denying Bruni a spot than they ever would by letting him in. Never mind.
jayfallon at 10:45AM on 04/04/08