At The Eighty-Six in Manhattan, exclusivity is the point.
The luxe, 11-table steakhouse is the sort of place that lavishes caviar and aged mimolette cheese on its potatoes, and crows that your market-price duck was raised by one Dr. Joe Jurgielewicz, DVM, in the rural hills of Pennsylvania. Taylor Swift has reportedly dined there in a Miu Miu skirt.
Reservations are a scarce commodity that the restaurant, and New York law forbids you from selling one. “Access is the main asset,” wrote food writer Helen Rosner in a recent New Yorker review of The Eighty-Six. “The product is the door, and what a door! An impossible door!”
What may be more surprising is that arguably New York’s most exclusive restaurant will set aside space for diners only via “table drops” for The Eighty-Six on DoorDash, a food logistics app that until recently placed its bets on the notion that you’d rather eat burritos at home.
After acquiring hospitality tech company SevenRooms last year, DoorDash has plunged whole-body into a raging war with competing tech companies such as Resy and OpenTable for control over an increasingly scarce asset: seats at some of the most exclusive restaurants in the country.
“We’re offering value to customers to discover new restaurants for casual dining,” DoorDash CEO Tony Xu told investors in a February 2026 earnings call. “We’re also doing it in the form of access— where we’re offering reservations to some of the best restaurants.”
Equally unreservable New York sister restaurants Or’esh and The Corner Store, likewise, will not save you a seat except through DoorDash’s app and website. Exclusive arrangements with DoorDash and SevenRooms also hold for some of the most gate-kept restaurants in Miami, like Michelin-recognized Ecuadorian hot spot Cotoa or Miami-London steakhouse Sparrow Italia.
So far, DoorDash has rolled out reservations in 13 of the largest US cities, including Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Chicago. But many more are slated.
Deep in the Reservation Wars
Maybe it’s the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, which accustomed the country to wildly long incubation times on plans for food and drink. Or maybe it’s just a sign of growing wealth inequality, as middlebrow restaurants struggle but ultra-exclusive experiences for the wealthy proliferate.
But as WIRED’s colleagues at Bon Appetit noted a few years back, restaurant reservation mania has in recent years spiraled into competitive sport, leading to a gray economy of gig-work line-standers and a damaging black market of restaurant scalpers who hoarded reservations and resold seats to high bidders.
A parade of American cities, beginning with New York, have since outlawed reservation scalping after lobbying by restaurant groups. What’s taken its place is a new pitched battle among restaurant reservation apps.
DoorDash is the newest and perhaps most disruptive entrant in these reservation wars, as technology apps leverage restaurant access to bring diners into an entire loyalty-based ecosystem—often through partnerships with credit card companies.
OpenTable is now offering dining credits and reserved tables at luxe restaurants in a number of major American cities for Chase Sapphire cardholders. Reservation app Resy, owned by credit card company American Express, has absorbed event ticketing app Tock to take this even further, creating an ecosystem of exclusive “experiences” and loyalty rewards for American Express cardholders.
DoorDash Moving in Fast
“But no one seems to be moving in as quickly, or as aggressively, as DoorDash, already the largest dining delivery app in the country before folding in SevenRooms. DoorDash has been quick to press this advantage by locking down exclusive access to some of the most in-demand tables across the country.
In Manhattan alone, more than 200 restaurants have current or pending deals with DoorDash to offer exclusive tables, times, or reservations. At the February earnings call, DoorDash CEO Xu laid out the strategy: becoming an everything app for restaurants to capture customers.
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