How To Bribe Your Way Into New York Restaurants

This is a really great piece about bribing your way into New York’s finest restaurants. On the roster are: Balthazaar, Le Bernadin, Daniel, Union Square Cafe, and Alain Ducasse. The piece is slightly old (it’s from Gourmet’s October 2000 issue) but offers an uncanny lesson in how money talks.

2 thoughts on “How To Bribe Your Way Into New York Restaurants”

  1. Cool article. I learned this from the other side – my very first job, when I was 18, was hostessing at one of the Buckhead Life restaurants. We regularly had a wait of 2-3 hours on Friday and Saturday nights. All it took to jump the line was to slip $10-20 to one of the team of hostesses. We’d throw the money in the drawer of the hostess stand and split the take at the end of the night (though the evil lead hostess would always take the lion’s share). The managers encouraged this – it added to the prestige of the restaurant. We just had to be discrete about it.

    It made me feel way cool.

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