Table at 7? L.A. begs to differ How full the restaurants weren't

"Most managers don't care because they're only managers," says Thierry Perez, co-owner of Fraîche in Culver City, and a longtime front-of-the-house man. He chalks up the booking difficulty phenomenon to a citywide crisis in good restaurant management. "The big issue right now is that the managers in Los Angeles are, I'm sorry to say, not very good. They're just thinking about themselves. It's why most restaurants are closing after two years.

"They don't care about the success of the restaurants. They want to have two easy seatings. And it makes no sense because it makes it more difficult for the kitchen, because then you have two big rushes."

The two-seating tactic clearly wasn't what was going on when I tried to make a 7 p.m. reservation for two at the Water Grill downtown on a recent Tuesday and had to settle for 7:15. We showed up at 7, and there were 20 empty tables in the main dining room.

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Balancing act

WHEN I called Barbara Marie, Water Grill's general manager, she said that on that particular night, they had a couple of large parties that canceled. Then she explained that at high-caliber fine dining restaurants, it's all about managing the flow of diners, so the kitchen doesn't get overwhelmed and so the wait staff can deliver the best service. "We take so many reservations at 6, 6:15, 7, 7:15, 7:30," she said. "For the kitchen, for the flow, for the service, the goal is for the guest to have the best experience possible." So when a reservationist at Water Grill sees that a 7 o'clock slot is filled with 23 or 24 guests, he or she suggests 7:15, even though there are still tables empty at 7.

"That is a balancing act in this industry," Marie said.

According to Brooke Brown, general manager at Katsuya, a good manager can look at the reservation books and anticipate what a given night will be like, depending on whether there's a full crew on, or a couple of servers or cooks are out sick, and slip in an extra booking or two in a time slot -- or not -- accordingly. Managing the flow has become more problematic since reservation services such as Open Table have become prevalent (most L.A. restaurants use one of three such services; Katsuya uses one called Guest Bridge).

These services make handling reservations a no-brainer for the restaurant, but at the same time, they can also take that all-important human element out of the equation in a way that might exacerbate the problem from the diners' point of view.