“You must try Alain Ducasse,” declared my editor. At first, I thought this was a cruel joke. The press was buzzing about the new restaurant from France's maestro-chef that boasts a $2 million interior, a $160 tasting menu, and a bill for four approaching $1,500. Although the phone lines weren't yet open, the word on the street was that the 65 seats a night were already booked for six months, with a 2,700-person waiting list. According to The New York Times, “Ordinary diners have less than a snowball's chance of landing a table at Ducasse.”
I was clearly in another league of exclusivity. Lay eaters wouldn't dream of trying to enter a restaurant where if you order verbena tea they bring the plant to your table and a white-gloved waiter snips the leaves with silver shears.
Still, I had no choice.
Via Hacker News [1] “Pocketful of Dough [2]”
The author explains a technique that will get you into exclusive restaurants quickly, even those that require a reservation. It isn't cheap, and takes a certain nerve to do, but amazingly, it does seem to work wonders.
I just wish I knew about this earlier, if only to ask Mom just how pervasive this technique was.
[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=318827