When Rosaline Truong, 27, led her friends into Tao, a pan-Asian restaurant, they anticipated the too-cool reception that one often encounters in trendy spots festooned with oversize Buddhas.
Instead, they were greeted warmly and seated at a prime table — right at the dining room's center. Then the manager popped by to make sure that everything was going well, and a waiter ferried glasses of complimentary Champagne to the table. Truong, an immunologist living on the Upper East Side, looked like a big shot.
"My friends were impressed," she recalls. "They wanted to know where the Champagne was coming from."
Anne Wermiel/NY Post
Chef Michael White (right) and Costata staff lavish Joe Serure with attention because he pays $7 a month for a new app.
Truong played coy. She did not let on that the special treatment wasn't because she was a well-connected high roller, but rather because she'd signed up for a $7-per-month service.
For that humble fee, I Know the Chef, an app that launched in February, claims to get subscribers special treatment and tough reservations at 52 city restaurants, from trendy Catch to old standby Blue Water Grill.
The site's founder, Josh Stern, 26, says he was inspired to launch it after he got free edamame while dining out, thanks to his companion's connections. The freebie made him feel "like a million bucks."
Joe Serure, a 36-year-old
asset manager who lives on the Upper East Side, felt pretty special when he used I Know the Chef to get a desirable reservation at his new neighborhood hot spot, Arlington Club. "I called on my own for Thursday night, and was told that they only had 5 or 11 p.m.," he recalls.
Then he remembered hearing about I Know the Chef, signed up and promptly snagged a table for four at
8 p.m. "When we got there, the place was mobbed and the manager came out to shake my hand," he recalls. "Then he pierced us through the crowd and put us at a great table right in the center of things. People were looking at me, wondering who this guy is. It felt nice."
I Know the Chef doesn't pay participating restaurants for the perks, nor does it get money from them, but it does help keep tables full in a city obsessed with the newest spots.
"[Hot restaurants] have a curve of being super busy right out of the box," says chef Michael White, who has signed up two restaurants, Ai Fiori and Nicoletta, from his Altamarea restaurant empire for the service. "They don't stay that way."
White is also offering a limited number of last-minute (and perhaps less-than-prime) reservations at two of his other restaurants, acclaimed high-end seafood spot Marea and new steakhouse Costata.
"At Marea, for reservations between 7 and 9 p.m., I turn away 250 to 300 people per day," he says. "But I am still signing up for I Know the Chef. It helps to fill the slots that are not in the most demand."
But the extra level of service doesn't always come through. Such was the case for Maegan Simpson, a 35-year-old customer insights specialist who lives in Manhattan. After being treated like a queen when she used the service at Fatty 'Cue — two rounds of free cocktails, a complimentary fried bacon appetizer and a table visit from the manager — Simpson expected the same when she booked a table at the subterranean Mexican restaurant Pulqueria. She'd even bragged to her dining companions to expect something special.
Instead, they got poor service and no freebies, save for a comped $9 dessert on their $350 bill. It "was not the same experience [as before]," she laments. (A Pulqueria manager says the restaurant's only obligation is a free dessert.)
And some in the industry find the app more laughable than laudable. "It's funny and doesn't surprise me. It sounds like [buying] bragging rights, " says Greg Morabito, editor of restaurant blog Eater NY. "A good establishment, if
you . . . are a good customer, they treat you well anyway."
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