Despite my best efforts, I couldn’t figure out the way in, until a well-connected friend who understood my hunger for thirtysomething-dollar pastas and Caesar salad prepared tableside slipped me an e-mail address and made me promise not to share it. I worry that even writing its name will get me blacklisted forever then again, I’ve never actually made it in, so what’s to lose?Ĭarbone, an upscale homage to Italian-American red-sauce joints, opened in Greenwich Village, in 2013, and became an impossible reservation almost instantly. The referral-only number for Bohemian, the secretive Japanese steakhouse, is a matter of extraordinary discretion, much like the restaurant itself.

You’ll need to text the right person to get in at Emilio’s Ballato. The friends-and-family line for Pastis and Balthazar is an open secret. Then there are the restaurants with unlisted phone numbers. Rao’s, the venerable celebrity safe house in East Harlem, has remained so steadfastly impenetrable that it has spawned an entire genre of “I got in maybe you can, too” stunt journalism. In the early two-thousands, social power meant being spotted in the sleek, terraced dining room at Per Se-ideally, at one of the tables set against the window. In the eighties and nineties, the city’s rich and famous batted their lashes at Sirio Maccioni, the ringmaster at Le Cirque. In New York City, no matter who you are, there is always a restaurant reservation that you’re never going to get.

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