Securing reservations at New Jersey’s most popular restaurants is no small feat.
At hot spots in Montclair, Jersey City and elsewhere, tables are often booked as quickly as they become available; a month’s schedule gone in minutes.
But if you don’t have time track tables like Taylor Swift tickets, you can still snag seats — for a price.
Third-party websites are scooping up exclusive New Jersey restaurant reservations and reselling them, creating bidding wars in the process. Think StubHub meets eBay, Jersey dining edition.
Guests willing to spent top dollar can cut the line with platforms like Appointment Trader, an online marketplace that launched in 2021 and allows the sale of reservations for restaurants, hotels and bars.
Suggested bids for a table for two at red-hot Pasta Ramen, ranked Montclair’s best restaurant by NJ.com, range from $145 to $220 on Appointment Trader. Suggested bidding for a table of the same size at Mezcal in Old Bridge, one of New Jersey’s best new steakhouses, ranges from $125 to $195.
Here’s how it works: Bidders, i.e. folks who want a hot table, make an offer on the site. Sellers, who the site calls “concierges,” fill those bids. The sellers can be anyone from college kids trying to make extra cash to restaurant workers who have the means to a table. There is no screening process for users who want to sell tables, and restaurants receive no money from this exchange; cash goes from bidder to seller, minus a fee taken by the site.
The reservations are often secured by sellers on online booking services like OpenTable and Resy before taking the tables to Appointment Trader. Suggested offer amounts are generated by the site as restaurants are compared to others of similar popularity.
While high-rolling foodies love the marketplace, New Jersey politicians don’t. State senators have proposed a bi-partisan bill that would ban third-party reservation services, arguing the system could lead to empty tables as resellers prioritize profit over genuine patronage — a concern New Jersey restaurant owners share.
Politicians stepping in
State senators have sponsored Bill S4543, which would prohibit third-party restaurant reservation services like Appointment Trader. Sen. Kristin Corrado (R-Passaic) and Sen. Joseph Lagana (D-Bergen) are primary sponsors for the bill.
While they hope to pass the law before the World Cup comes to MetLife Stadium next summer, it is currently not close to being passed. It has thus far only been introduced in the New Jersey Senate. Both the General Assembly and Senate are currently in summer recess.
Corrado told NJ Advance Media the World Cup was on her mind when she introduced the legislation, citing similar laws that has been enacted in New York and Illinois.
“Our restaurants are set to benefit from all the fans and soccer enthusiasts from around the world who will flock to New Jersey for the games.” Corrado said. “The last thing we need is our restaurants to sit empty because of gaps in our laws protecting business from profiteering third parties.”
With more than one million visitors expected in New Jersey for the World Cup, prices for these reservations could skyrocket into the thousands. Someone paid $2,138 for a four-top table at acclaimed French-Creole restaurant Antoine’s in New Orleans this past February, as the city hosted the Super Bowl.
Violators of the new law would face penalties of up to $1,000 for each violation. Corrado said law enforcement professionals and prosecutors will be trusted to enforce and monitor the law.
A ‘sleazy’ service
The owners of several popular New Jersey restaurants see the potential benefits of the bill.
Mezcal, one of the hottest New Jersey restaurants to open in 2025, has dealt with its own reservation issues, which general manager Eddie Sunday described as “frustrating.”
Reservation trading by third-party apps has led to tables being traded for hundreds of dollars. New Jersey lawmakers have introduced a bill to ban the practice.
The Mexican-inspired steakhouse has become so popular since it opened in April that guests began booking several tables in the same night through OpenTable.
“We’re starting to see people with five reservations in one night,” Sunday told NJ Advance Media. “It’s frustrating because some people are holding reservations, which is a huge amount of revenue we could lose.”
Whether the tables were to be traded is unclear. The eatery has since restricted guests from being able to double-book tables on the platform.
“I don’t want to use the term ‘sleazy’ but it really is,” Sunday said of Appointment Trader. “For someone to book a reservation just to go and sell it really undermines the true value of the business. We don’t want people to feel like they’re being taken advantage of when they come to one of our places.”
Other popular Garden State restaurants share a similar sentiment. The team at Pasta Ramen, the posh Essex County Japanese-Italian eatery from James Beard Award semi-finalist Robbie Felice, would prefer patrons not have to jump through hoops for a seat at their tables.
“I think we’re all in the same boat as restaurant owners,” Felice said. “We’d rather people who work hard for their money spend it at other restaurants or our restaurants again instead of spending it on reservations.
Reservation trading by third-party apps has led to tables being traded for hundreds of dollars. New Jersey lawmakers have introduced a bill to ban the practice.
Pasta Ramen was booking out months ahead of time when it first opened in 2023. When the books opened shortly before the restaurant’s grand opening, nearly 3,000 reservations were made within the first 24 hours. Reservations for March of 2023 sold out on Feb. 1 — in 18 minutes. What percentage of those bookings were scooped up to be resold is unclear.
“I hate to say it, but it’s a good feeling to know that we created a concept where people are willing to sell and buy reservations,” Felice said. “But I don’t think that’s anything to really celebrate because I don’t think it’s right.”
Appointment Trader weighs in
After a similar bill passed in New York, Appointment Trader founder Jonas Frey called the law “horses—.”
Frey compares his site to rideshare apps.
“It’s basically like an Uber ride,” Frey told NJ Advance Media. “When you hire an Uber, it doesn’t say, ‘oh, I have a ride from here to here.’ It just says, ‘in your area, for this amount, someone will pick you up.’ And that’s exactly how this works.”
Frey explained that sellers aren’t always selling reservations they never intended to use. Some are indeed selling reservations they couldn’t use, if they could not longer make it to dinner.
In 2023, the platform started implementing penalties for scalpers who booked up too many reservations at a time. The system disallows new users from posting more than 10 reservations and at least 50% of the slots have to be resold before your account is restricted.
“We’ve enforced pretty steep penalties for people that upload reservations with the hopes of just selling them,” Frey said. “Because we imposed these limits, people don’t post hundreds of reservations. And we introduced this way before anyone was talking about legislation. They were obviously not going to be selling these reservations and restaurants are going to be empty.”
But even if Frey doesn’t like the bill, New Jersey politicians stand by it.
“The legislation protects both restaurants and their patrons,” Corrado explained. “No one wants to pay a third-party vendor for a reservation or see empty restaurants because reservations are being illicitly booked.”
Reservation trading by third-party apps has led to tables being traded for hundreds of dollars. New Jersey lawmakers have introduced a bill to ban the practice.
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Christopher Burch can be reached at cburch@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter: @SwishBurch. Find NJ.com on Facebook. Have a tip? Tell us at nj.com/tips/.
