Inside Danny Meyer’s original Union Square Cafe in 1997, the year before OpenTable launched. (Photo by Mark Peterson/Getty Images.)
O
n a sunny afternoon last September, a friend and I walked into Union Square Cafe, the iconic restaurant opened by restaurateur Danny Meyer 40 years ago. We didn’t have a reservation, but the restaurant had space. When the host asked for a phone number before seating us, my friend offered his, knowing it should’ve pulled up documentation of years’ worth of visits and a note that he’d once worked for the company. Instead, the host looked up from her tablet, smiled, and asked if it was our first visit.
No, my friend said, he’d been there dozens of times. The host apologized; the restaurant had recently switched reservations providers from Resy to SevenRooms, she said, and the restaurant’s notes on some guests weren’t showing up in the system. After we were seated, the floor manager touched our table to offer another apology that felt generous; I’m sure that tech glitch caused the restaurant more trouble than it could ever cause us.
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