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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 reservation companies 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 reservation apps leverage restaurant access to bring diners into an entire loyalty-based ecosystem—often through partnerships with credit card companies that accrue loyalty benefits.
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.
“It's kind of proving the thesis,” he told investors. “If you can add the best-in-class [hospitality] software with the largest demand generator platform, which is DoorDash, it is a really valuable asset.”
Manhattan spots like Japanese jewel box Tokyo Record Bar, and former opera house Chinese Tuxedo, may not have locked down exclusive reservations with DoorDash or SevenRooms. But at each restaurant, holders of the food app's DashPass membership can gain access to a number of evening tables not available to any other customers.
As DoorDash rolls out its reservation program at a growing number of cities across the country since late 2025, the company is also straight-up paying DashPass members to make reservations with the app. If I go to book a reservation at Manhattan Japanese spot Sushi Noz, the app offers me $12 in dining credits if I complete my reservation. Similar deals hold at restaurants across the app.
The bribery seems to be working, at least anecdotally. A New York-based colleague at WIRED began booking DoorDash reservations with increasing giddiness this month—collecting $10 in credits for dining at New York spot Emmett's on the Grove and fielding offers for even more $10 credits for sending referrals to friends.
"Got another $10 credit for dining yesterday!" she wrote. “So it seems like I keep getting $10 til I reach $600 per year.” She followed this message with an Edvard Munch scream emoji that implied the opposite of horror.
Less advertised is the degree to which all of these apps are gathering data about their customers' habits. This nest of cross-partnerships and acquisitions also comes with the ability to track diners across multiple platforms. Reservation and hospitality apps like SevenRooms already are known to track diner habits at granular levels, including who tips and who indulges and who hates mushrooms and who has a habit of no-showing their reservations.
Reservation app Resy CEO Pablo Rivera mentioned this in a February address to investors as an unbridled benefit to customers, though diners may have to decide for themselves whether they enjoy the fact their server already knows their star sign.
“Finally, no more whispering to the server at the host stand that there’s a birthday at the table,” Rivera wrote. "The server will already know and have a candle ready."
