The scarcity theatre playing out in restaurants today

I have never eaten at Papa’s in Bandra, Mumbai, the 12-seater chef’s table run by chef Hussain Shahzad that was recently named one of Time magazine’s World’s Greatest Places 2025, but during a recent visit to Veronica’s, above which Papa’s is perched like a secret little hidey-hole, I did get a tour of the space. It was mid-morning, and the chef was prepping for the 13-course dinner he serves Wednesday through Saturday. “This is the calm before the madness,” he said, flicking a checkered towel over his shoulder and diving into the tiny kitchen.

Just like Mordor, one does not simply walk into Papa’s. Spots at the table are reserved months in advance (right now, they are booked through April, while reservations for May will start on 1 April). Even Dua Lipa, in Mumbai for a concert, had to book two seats as soon as her travel was fixed, a trusted source tells me. It’s a similar story with Naru Noodle Bar in Bengaluru, which has attained near-mythical status on social media for its fastest-fingers-first reservation process that opens every Monday at 8pm and lasts around 15 minutes before all 20 seats are booked through the week.

Lounge recently wrote about this changing dynamic in India’s restaurant scene, where making restaurant reservations was dismissed as a fancy Western practice till a few years ago. Today, it’s not just Papa’s and Naru that have you book tables, you are encouraged to do so at any good restaurant. And as a person who dines out a lot, I’m not complaining—it’s the organised, courteous way to do things.

I do object, however, to the theatre of scarcity that can sometimes play out. Recently, at a very popular pizzeria in Bengaluru, a group of friends had to wait almost half an hour for a table after failing to make a reservation a couple of days earlier because “we are fully booked”. When they finally made it to a table in the restaurant, which is spread over three floors, after a 20-minute wait, they saw that a large number of tables were empty—and remained so for the two hours they spent there. When they left, there were a bunch of people still waiting while the rooftop was near-empty. Another friend recalls trying to book a table at a buzzy Asian coffee shop in Bengaluru, being told that they needed to be there at a specific time in the afternoon, scrambling to get there and then finding there was no rush actually—several tables remained free through the afternoon.

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There is nothing wrong with restaurants trying to optimise their resources, including service and kitchen staff, by asking diners to book tables only during specific slots—say 7-9pm and 9-11pm. A lot of smaller Bengaluru spaces do this—from Soka and Spirit Forward to Navu and Farmlore—with transparency and friendliness.

What I do object to is restaurants hemming and hawing about tables not being available when they visibly are, or not making them available to waiting customers as soon as they are free, whether it is through inefficiency or strategy. If you know you have tables but not enough staff, I don’t know, hire more staff? Close a section? Put some thought into the pattern of your customer flow—every traditional south Indian eatery that offers seating does this without a fuss—and build predictability around it?

Restaurants whose size is directly linked to the quality of food they are able to achieve can only physically accommodate so many people at a time without opening a portal into a parallel dimension. This doesn’t mean a 100-cover restaurant can get away with using this strategy to drum up some good old excitement.

One can’t walk out of Mordor easily, but walking out of a restaurant is not quite that hazardous.

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