Reasons to eat at home.

Reasons to eat-in.

Frank Bruni has written an entertaining article in today’s New York Times.   Seems he needed to vent about the uppity ways of our celebrity chefs.  Seems to me that he hit a nail on the head. First there was the ‘private number’…. If you really wanted a reservation at Balthazar that wasn’t at 5:00 or midnight, you needed to have the private number. Then the rules and regulations for reservations started to get more complex….now, you need a notepad to keep track of how, when and where you need to reconfirm your reservation. Ah, read the article yourself, its pretty funny and has the blog  world and eGullet  entertained.
Here’s another reason to eat in: now you can buy a reservation at some of the top tables. Prime Tables  is a website, "dining club’ that will sell you reservations at major restaurants. You have to register on the site,  you don’t use your own name for the reservation and it is forbidden to mention that the reservation came thru Prime Tables.  So, if you have a client, that absolutely has to eat at Per Se, your chances just got better. But, is this a good thing for the restaurant industry? Maybe the restaurants can cut out the middle man and just charge you a surcharge for premium time reservations? Maybe they can set up some complex sliding scale of restaurant prices depending on supply, demand and the way the wind is blowing, just like the airlines. Then we can have another industry of websites boasting that they can get you meals at French Laundry cheaper than anyone else. Oh, we could be on to something!