In every big city, there are a handful of restaurants where it can be tough to land a reservation, but a select number of world-class eateries take exclusivity to the next level; no matter how hard you try, you’ll probably never get in, even if you can manage to foot the bill. Seats and Stools, a company that makes restaurant seating, found 11 restaurants where it’s nearly impossible to get a table. If you think the world-famous Noma is hard to get into (it fielded 20,000 reservation calls a day before announcing its imminent close in February 2017), try getting a table at the Walt Disney-founded Club 33, a private club where membership initiation costs $40,000, annual fees run you $12,000, and the waiting list is 14 years long.
Other restaurants have shorter wait times—meaning a year or so—but require reservations to be placed at very specific times (like when the restaurant empties its voicemail box), or at midnight on the first day of the month. Some, like New York’s Damon Baehrel, have waiting lists that are so long, they’ve stopped taking reservations altogether (to the point that some people have questioned that particular restaurant’s myth altogether). Check out some of the world’s most sought-after restaurants below.
November 16, 2016 – 10:30am