Reservations

In the initial buzz of a new challenge, I immediately plunged into all the readings and ratings and before I knew it, I had made five reservations. Ah, opentable, you make things just a little too easy. That was definitely the easy part!

In the long term, I'm not entirely sure how this is all going to work out. I definitely do not want to eat all these meals solo, and besides, then I am stuck with only the food I can order myself and thus cannot sample that lovely dessert/appetizer/sauce under your duck. And strangers tend to frown upon this behaviour, even when you are pushing the fabulous citrus souffle towards them, insistent that they try some.

So anyhow, five reservations. The first one was Japanese, and I had just finished a sushi class with a friend. So SD was my first invitee. And SA lived there for years, and that was #2. And AS lives and works quite close by, so, ta-da, 4! But my work has been pretty stressful lately and I never followed up with folks about last Friday's reservation, so ended up canceling it. I have another coming up this Saturday, and need to come up with a better plan. Foody friends are lovely and all, but they have limits on how much planning, money and time they will spend on this, and I fear that getting through the list is not something I can leave to happen organically.

What I am going to do, though, is be very aware of opportunities when they present themselves, and work to the advantage of what folks have expressed an interest in and work from there. I think I may also throw it out to a couple of groups I'm involved in - supping with new people can be a lot of fun, as long as they don't stiff the waitstaff!

One reservation, however, has gone extraordinarily well. Minibar is supposedly the hardest reservation to get in the States. I read about this during my second attempt. I'm hitting redial, while reading people's despairing posts about their failed attempts - in some cases, weeks or months of attempts - to land seats. Not a great idea, by the way, unless you really like freaking yourself out. Minibar is such a hard reservation to land because there are only six seats, and two seatings each night. And those are only five nights a week. The reservation line opens at 10am for a month in advance, which is generally filled within fifteen minutes, if you can get through! Minibar had come up in a discussion with IG, NC and AS, so at least I had that part taken care of. Now I just had to hope that I could eventually get through and land one of these elusive reservations. And on the fourth try, much to my absolute astonishment, I did. And by some further miracle, I managed to spell my email address correctly, and fork over my credit card information, and we are set for early December! Score!

This, however, was somewhat of a covert operation as I was at work, so I had no one to tell or to vent to! So instead I sent a lot of emails and texts with a lot of MINIBAR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! thrown in liberally.

Now I just need to figure out twitter so I can track down that lobster truck...