Just Booked A Reservation At The Hottest Restaurant In Town, Baby!

I am late to reserving tables at restaurants online.  It seems to cheap and easy to do it.  I'm Generation X, and when you wanted to reserve a table at a restaurant, you call them up and ask for one.  But convenience and my aversion to talking to people have accelerated my preference for doing these things online.  Yes, I'm giving in.

On the other hand, if you have a very popular restaurant to which you want to go, the advent of online reservations reshapes your chances of getting a reservation.  It's a free-for-all, and only the quickest, nimblest and most aggressive get tables.  If you eschew online reserving, doing it this way will suck.  But if you know how to play the game, and if you like playing the game, getting a table on the Internet turns into a beaucoup advantage for you.

Owamni is the hottest restaurant in the Twin Cities right now.  Tables are extremely hard to come by, and I imagine they've gotten harder since The New Yorker named it The Best New Restaurant Of 2022.  Their website points you to the website Resy to do their reservations.  This sort of feels like the time when people stopped camping out to buy concert tickets and started bombing websites to the point where tickets sold out in minutes.  But like I said, if you know how to work the system, the system will work for you, and beautifully.

The key thing to know, I have come to find out, is that reservations for a certain day open up at midnight local time.  That might not be a state secret, but nonetheless I was armed with that information so I knew that at midnight, BAM!, I needed to get to the page where they had reservations for that day and find a table.  It was as if the Red Sea parted for Moses, in a way: Every single popular dinner time was there, in virgin white (with border and text in ... orange?  I wasn't paying attention), waiting for me to pluck it.  And I selected 7 p.m.  And I selected six seats, even though I only know for certain that me and my friend, with whom we have made a holiday tradition of going to the Arrows and then eating at a fancy restaurant, would be dining at Owamni.  Two people (one a mutual friend of ours from high school, one his friend who is now also my friend!) joined us for dinner last year, however, and who knows, maybe two more of our friends would want to join us to see what the hubbub over this place is about.  Frankly, I was ready to reserve more spots, but I would have had to, well, call if I wanted a table for more than six.

So that's what I got: A table for six at 7 p.m. on Saturday, December 10 at Owamni.  Right now, I feel that snagging this reservation is a bigger accomplishment than getting my degree.