Do restaurants still take reservations?

Lots of restaurants still take reservations.

Many still do. Some in my tourist town don’t take reservations at busy times, like summer weekends. You can often make a reservation through opentable.com or just by calling the restaurant.

Maybe the problem here is that we’re so small they just don’t care whether we show up or not. The daughter throwing the party says she runs into this a lot & very few of our local restaurants will take reservations anymore. Now we’ll show up at 1:00 & it will take them 30–45 minutes to get us all seated even close to each other. I’m still debating whether or not I’ll even go!!!

@LadyMarissa It does seem kind of crazy that they wouldn’t want to be prepared and set up for a party of 11.

The most popular one in the town I am at does.
“Butter and Salt” does a brisk business, it seems. :)

Restaurants don’t want to be hit with no shows, so won’t take reservations. They miss a party of eleven that will take the room of three four tops, but they can turn the four tops over in the time of the large party, and make more money.

There are competing reservation apps, restaurants use them to make it easy for people to reserve, and it also holds people accountable for their reservation.

Before Open Table started online reservations, many restaurants were giving up because of so many no shows. With online reservations, you can only make one reservation for an evening, so you’re most likely to go then. And if you end up with more than a couple no shows, you get banned.

Depends on the restaurant. A lot of restaurants where I live take reservations only for 8 or more.

Many restaurants don’t take reservations at all.

Some restaurants take call ahead seating, meaning you call when you are on your way (less than an hour) and when you arrive your place in the wait line is from when you called. Then they are also prepared with how large your party is, and can start sorting tables if they need to push some together.

In busy large restaurants that have long waits they don’t need extra staff for a large party, and they don’t like to hold tables, because it’s just simply very busy anyway. It’s not ideal to go to those places with very large parties. Usually, if time is important we would have one person arrive 30 minutes early to get the process started before everyone arrives.

Fancy ones do. Restaurants that rate four dollar signs on Yelp do.

Yes here they still do.

I suggest talking to the owner/manager and maybe offer a deposit or even preorder the meals…
( have the menu photocopied to show family members and explain the reason to prepay in order to pull this off successfully).

In this case Money talks!
As for drinks they can order when they are seated and pay there.

@zenvelo That makes sense. Sadly, the restaurant the chose is not on the opentable network. We did luck out though…a new restaurant had chosen this weekend for their grand opening & they were just 2 doors down. The restaurant we went to was a ghost town & they welcomed us with open arms!!! We were seated within 10 minutes & that was becase we wanted to sit together & we had to wait for 1 table to pay up, leave, & cleanp so it would be ready to go. We had a good meal & they were slow enough that they weren’t rushing us to relinquish our table before we could finish eating. All in all we had a good time with good food…must say it turned out a LOT better than I expected!!!