HST-era competitive pressures in the restaurant industry are causing restaurateurs to undertake a cost-benefit analysis to determine whether it’s in their interests to take reservations.
Stepho Karalis (Stepho’s Souvlaki Greek Taverna) and Vikram Vij (Vij’s) have long believed that it’s worse to have reserved tables sit empty when customers are late than to lose customers who patronize eateries that can guarantee them a table at a certain time.
Their beliefs are starting to gain traction among younger entrepreneurs.
“Restaurants have almost no profit margin,” Bao Bei Chinese Brasserie owner Tannis Ling told Business in Vancouver. “I can’t afford to have people not show up for their reservations, which would happen quite a bit. They’re usually late. It doesn’t work for us to have empty tables sitting there.”
Ling’s popular year-old eatery frequently requires customers to wait 45 minutes or more for a table – something she thinks wouldn’t happen were her food and service not exemplary.
The adage that accepting reservations makes business sense for fine-dining restaurants but not casual bistros continues to have its supporters.
Victoria’s Brasserie L’école, however, stood that conventional wisdom on its ear in 2009, when principals Marc Morrison and Sean Brennan stopped taking reservations.
Brasserie L’ école opened in 2001 and earned Vancouver Magazine nods as the best restaurant in Victoria, Wine Access Magazine acknowledgement for being one of Canada’s “top wine-savvy” restaurants and a positive review in the New York Times.
The B.C. capital’s newly expanded and upscale Italian restaurant Zambri’s similarly eschews reservations.
“We can’t do volume if I allot two hours for every table of people who come in. Sometimes people are gone in 45 minutes and the table sits there for an hour empty,” said Chris Stewart, who recently opened Cafeteria on Main Street along with partner Andrey Durbach. “So we’re trying something new at Cafeteria by not taking reservations.”
The duo take reservations at West Side eateries La Buca and Pied-â-Terre, which they also co-own.
L’Abbatoir owner Paul Grunberg, conversely, has a been-there-done-that attitude to not taking reservations.
He launched his Gastown restaurant last summer determined not to take reservations because he believed he would be able to keep prices down and attract more customers if he maximized table use and had brisk customer turnover.
That ended after a chat with his father. “He said, ‘If you weren’t my son, I wouldn’t come to your restaurant no matter how good it is because you can’t guarantee me a seat,’” Grunberg said.