The luxury, 11-table steakhouse is a place that enjoys caviar and aged mimolette cheese on its potatoes, and crows that your market-price duck was raised in the rural hills of Pennsylvania by one Dr. Joe Jurgielewicz, DVM. Taylor Swift has reportedly dined there wearing a Miu Miu skirt.
Reservations are a rare commodity that are prohibited from being sold in restaurants, and New York law prevents you from selling them. “Accessibility is the main asset,” wrote food writer Helen Rosner in a recent New Yorker review of The Eighty-Six. “The product is a door, and what a door! An impossible door!”
What might be more surprising is that possibly New York’s most exclusive restaurant will be setting aside space for diners to order The Eighty-Six on DoorDash via “Table Drops,” a food logistics app that recently placed its bet on the notion that you’d rather eat a burrito at home.
After acquiring hospitality tech company SevenRooms last year, DoorDash has thrown itself into a fierce battle with competing reservations companies for control of an increasingly scarce asset: seats at some of the country’s most exclusive restaurants.
“We’re offering value to customers finding new restaurants for casual dining,” DoorDash CEO Tony Xu told investors in a February 2026 earnings call. “We’re also doing it as access—where we’re offering reservations at some of the best restaurants.”
At equally unreserved New York sister restaurants Or’Esh and The Corner Store, other than DoorDash’s app and website, you won’t save a seat. Special arrangements with DoorDash and SevenRooms are also in place for some of Miami’s most gate-kept restaurants, like Michelin-recognized Ecuadorian hot spot Cotoa or Miami-London steakhouse Sparrow Italia.
So far, DoorDash has launched reservations in 13 of the largest US cities, including Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Chicago. But there is much more proposed.
deep into reservation wars
Perhaps this is a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has made the country accustomed to living on food and drink plans for wildly long periods of time. Or perhaps it’s just a sign of growing wealth inequality, as middlebrow restaurants struggle but ultra-exclusive experiences for the rich are on the rise.
But as WIRED’s colleagues at Bon Appétit noted a few years ago, the restaurant reservation craze has escalated into a competitive game in recent years, creating a gray economy of gig-work line-standers and a damaging black market of restaurant scalpers who hoard reservations and resell seats to high bidders.
A parade of US cities, starting with New York, have outlawed reservation deductions after lobbying by restaurant groups. It’s been replaced by a new 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 earn loyalty benefits.
DoorDash is growing fast
“But it seems no one is moving as fast or aggressively as DoorDash, which was already the nation’s largest dining delivery app before SevenRooms closed in. DoorDash has been quick to squeeze this advantage by shutting down exclusive access to some of the most sought-after tables across the country.
In Manhattan alone, more than 200 restaurants have current or pending deals with DoorDash to offer special tables, times or reservations. In a February earnings call, DoorDash CEO Xu laid out the strategy: To become an all-in-one app for restaurants to capture customers.
“It’s kind of proving the thesis,” he told investors. “If you can add best in class [hospitality] Having software with the largest demand generator platform, which is DoorDash, is truly a valuable asset.
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