Bateman, Party of Two

Dorsia is a boutique reservation system with three tiers of membership, offering those members access to hot tables in crescendo with how much money they’re willing to put forward, and if your application passes muster. “We’re not a platform for just the rich,” Lotenberg is quick to assert, but he describes the ideal Dorsia user as a “nomadic LVMH economy-type customer.” This means you’re a globetrotter, one who regularly attends rarefied cultural events around the world like Cannes, the Serpentine Gala, and Wimbledon. And of course, you love to eat well. Or at least you expect to. Later this year, the app will launch a system for members’ clubs, and its own internal social network that Lotenberg describes as “if you took LinkedIn and Raya and they had a baby.” 

Do you get the joke? It’s an obvious one. The name Dorsia is famous from Bret Easton Ellis’s 1991 novel American Psycho, as the unattainable status restaurant in his violent satire of ’80s greed and excess. “All I seem to want to do now,” Patrick Bateman, the book’s murderous and oft-quoted protagonist, says at one point in the book, “is secure reservations at new restaurants I’ve already been to, then cancel them.” 

35 years after American Psycho was published, the garish decadence of the 1980s horseshoed into becoming unironically aspirational. (Ellis personally signed off on Lotenberg’s appropriation of the made-up restaurant, and became an early user.) How it works is this: There are three tiers of membership, tier one costs $200 per year, tier two is $5,000, and tier three is, hang on to your hat, $25,200 per year. Seems ridiculous? Well, once you put that money down, 20,000 “Fun Coupons” (a Wolf of Wall Street reference) are added to your account. Fun Coupons are Dorsia’s in-app currency, and 100 Fun Coupons are said to be equivalent in value to $1. They expire after a year, and depending on your membership status, they deposit into your account not all at once, but monthly. If you don’t use your Fun Coupons, they expire, and Dorsia keeps your money—the federally-backed kind.