Does Hospitality Suffer When a Top Cocktail Bar Goes All-in on Reservations?
By 5 p.m. on most nights, a healthy line of anxious hopefuls coalesces outside the entrance of schmuck. in New York City’s East Village. For those who didn’t have the forethought to make a reservation, their only hope to procure a coveted seat is to arrive early and join the queue. When schmuck. opened in early 2025, it offered only a handful of global access reservations via Resy, which are held exclusively for American Express cardholders; now almost half the tables in the early and late seatings can be booked in advance during the week. The bar still welcomes walk-ins throughout the night, but with more tables committed to reservations, the window to squeeze in has shrunk significantly.
Reservations were once an anomaly in bars, but they’re becoming increasingly common in the upper echelon of the craft cocktail world. In the past, visiting a bar was considered an open-ended experience, one where the duration of the stay was dictated by the guest’s, not the bar’s, schedule. Patrons would patiently wait for a table and once seated, it would be theirs as long as they needed. But today, many destination bars require reservations, and the booking often comes with a built-in, and often austere, time limit.
With the prestige conferred to certain bars by international awards programs like the World’s 50 Best, some patrons have warmed to the idea that reservations are required at lauded venues. “People seek out some bars for a specific drink that they’ve seen online or maybe even a dish that the bar has,” says schmuck. co-owner Moe Aljaff. “So, I think they’re more willing to make a reservation like they do with restaurants.”
But as reservations in bars become more commonplace, venues often struggle to strike the right balance between reserved tables and walk-ins. When door policies become too rigid, it’s often at the expense of service, causing frustration among guests who expect more flexibility from a bar than a restaurant.
Balancing Reservations with Walk-ins
Before Sip & Guzzle opened in 2024, the initial plan was to forgo reservations altogether. The owners hoped that the bifurcated design — with a more casual bar upstairs and a more refined lounge downstairs — would create a natural waiting area for walk-in guests, depending on which part of the bar they planned to visit. But having a more ambitious food program also meant the kitchen needed to plan ahead; not knowing how many guests to expect on any given night would be problematic for the chef. “In the beginning, we held fewer tables back [for walk-ins] because we didn’t know what the demand was going to be,” says Justin Weitz, one of Sip & Guzzle’s founding partners. “That gave us that extra security, but we found very quickly that going so reservation-heavy was making it impossible to accommodate walk-ins. We don’t want to be a place that turns people away.”
Notoriety can make it difficult to find balance between accommodating out-of-town guests and being accessible to locals. “At first, we operated completely on a first-come, first-served basis,” says Valerie Carrasco, director of operations for Scotch Lodge in Portland, Ore. “We wanted to allow time to get a feel for the neighborhood and understand the flow of service. Once we got settled in, we found that offering some reservations would be helpful for guests looking to plan a bit further in advance for special occasions or guests visiting from out of town.”
“I think putting time constraints on reservations adds to the anxiety of going out for people. It can really work against you [as a bar] if you’re not properly training people on how to explain your policies.”
Rather than reserving the entire bar, schmuck. allocates a small tranche of early and late reservations during the week to accommodate guests that might not be willing to make the trip without a firm commitment. “There are a lot of people who come in from Long Island or Staten Island,” Aljaff says. “If they make that trip and then they’re told it’s impossible to get in, that’s a real bummer.” New Yorkers may be less inclined to traverse the boroughs late at night without assurances that a table will be available. So, giving the option to make a reservation after 10 p.m. incentivizes them to book in advance while also ensuring the bar stays full.
Leveraging Reservation Platforms For Efficiency
Like most restaurants these days, many top bars deploy reservation platforms like Resy and OpenTable which have built-in features to help them run more efficiently and maximize revenue per seat. “When we do availability planning on the back end, OpenTable notifies us that on average our turn times are seven minutes shorter than what we had preset,” says Alex Jump, co-owner of the Peach Crease Club in Denver. “Then we can decide whether or not to adjust based on that data. Initially, I think we had slightly longer turn times planned for two-tops, and we just shortened it a little bit.”
These platforms also help streamline customer relations management. “Reservations are great as a communication tool. The software gives us options to Google people or connect to their LinkedIn profile page,” says Jump. “It’ll tell us what they frequently drink or order at other places. It’ll also tell you if somebody left a bad review, so you can try to leave a better impression next time.”
When it better serves guests, Aljaff isn’t afraid to make last minute adjustments to the template on the backend. “During the last heat wave, we decided to open up more tables for reservations so people wouldn’t have to deal with the lines outdoors,” he says. “When we posted about it on our socials, the tables got booked up within an hour or so.”
The Rise of the 90-Minute Turn
Offering reservations often forces bars to adopt stricter policies around how much time is allotted for each party. Kumiko in Chicago notifies guests of the 90-minute time limit on their table when they make a reservation. But since food is so integral to the experience, predicting how much each party will eat or drink can be difficult. “When we call our reservations beforehand to confirm, we prompt them for more information about their evening — whether they plan to have dinner or drinks or if they have dinner reservations somewhere else,” says owner Julia Momosé. “Then we can account for that in terms of how much time we allot for their table.”
At The Wig Shop in Boston, guests are reminded of the 90-minute time limit at the door when they arrive. Since there is no seated bar inside for guests to wait, problems turning tables can lead to logjams of frustrated guests by the entrance. “Trying to explain to someone from Boston that they can’t sit at the bar is one of the biggest challenges,” says beverage director Oscar Simoza.
“At the end of the day, people don’t want to be rushed through their experience and we try very hard to make Kumiko the kind of place that you don’t want to leave.”
The constant pressure to turn tables without making guests feel rushed can be daunting. “If we have to, we’ll touch base with guests and let them know that the table is promised to another party, so if they want to order more food or drinks they have ample time,” says Momosé. “Sometimes that’s the nudge they need. Sometimes people push back. Sometimes they’re downright nasty.”
Since being included among the World’s 50 Best Bars in North America, Kumiko is attracting more international guests. Momosé says it can be harder to enforce time limits when guests come from countries where being asked to relinquish the table in a timely manner isn’t part of their culture. “From what I understand, reservations are less common for bars in Europe and Asia, so there can be more misunderstanding around reservations with international guests,” she says.
Aljaff finds that New Yorkers tend to be more accepting of the need to return the table, compared to his experience in Barcelona, where he opened Two Schmucks in 2017. (He left the bar in 2022.) “If you try to flip a table in Spain, you’ll be cursed out by the Spanish,” he says. “They’ll sit and have a vermouth for like 2 hours, and if you try anything you’ll have an earful. Here, it seems that people are much more empathetic and understanding that if the bar is really busy and they’re finished, they can just pay up and give the table to someone else.”
Has Reservation Culture Gone Too Far?
While the need to turn tables is more urgent than ever amid rising costs and declining alcohol consumption, some bar owners believe that reservation culture has gotten out hand, and that normalizing ruthless time limits compromises the guest experience.
“None of our bars have time limits,” says Meaghan Dorman, bar director and partner at Dear Irving and Raines Law Room in NYC. “I think putting time constraints on reservations adds to the anxiety of going out for people. It can really work against you [as a bar] if you’re not properly training people on how to explain your policies.” The increasing need to make a reservation at top bars, Dorman says, also makes impromptu visits less likely. “I think popping in for a drink shouldn’t lose that magic of spontaneity.”
Accolades like inclusion on the World’s 50 Best list can put more pressure on top bars to offer reservations or empower them to implement firmer policies that compromise hospitality. As cocktail enthusiasts rely more on these best-of lists to dictate where to imbibe, previously casual spots can be swarmed with clout chasers. The fame that comes along with being a buzzy new bar can force businesses to rethink their seating strategies, often leaving them unprepared for the realities of being a global destination with the constant pressure of catering to expectant crowds.
Michael Aredes, who has bartended at New York City hotspots like Superbueno and Nightmoves, sees an increasing number of top bars treating guests impersonally. “There are a few very famous bars that have time limits on their seats and they remind guests every 15 minutes that they have to leave at a certain time,” he says. “And it comes across like they see you as just a number. There’s a very fine line between hospitality and hostility.”
For bars that rely heavily on reservations, managing guest expectations is a constant struggle. And allowing guests open-ended visits isn’t viable for every business, especially bars that are trying to offer a more elevated experience. “We talk a lot about these issues during pre-shift meetings,” says Momosé. “At the end of the day, people don’t want to be rushed through their experience and we try very hard to make Kumiko the kind of place that you don’t want to leave.”
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