Source: Upstartsmedia
AI-powered booking assistants are actively disrupting the scarcity-based prestige model that fine dining relies on. When an AI agent hammers Resy's servers to secure a table at 4 Charles, it bypasses the human friction—waitlists, relationships, timing—that created exclusivity. Restaurants have built cultural cachet on controlled access, but that gatekeeping dissolves once affluent users outsource booking to agents indifferent to social norms around restraint. The invite-only apps and reservation games that defined "hot" restaurants for the last decade may need to shift from access-scarcity to experience-scarcity, or risk becoming commodified booking problems solved by code.