$200 Just to Get in the Door at Don Angie

Digital sellers want to help you land the hardest reservations in town.

- RACHEL SUGAR

IT’S NEVER BEEN EASIER to make a restaurant reservation: Tap around a few times on Resy, OpenTable, or Tock, and you’re set. Bon appétit. But everyone knows there are additional, better reservations to claim, provided you have some clout or a cool job or know someone who knows someone, at restaurants that are unbearably exclusive—and meticulously designed for mass appeal. There’s 4 Charles Prime Rib, the closet-size West Village steakhouse with tufted leather seats and $40 French dips. There’s Ralph Lauren’s blue-blooded Polo Bar, where a Waldorf salad is on the menu and Howard Stern may well be sitting in the corner. There’s Don Angie, the TikTok-beloved ode to rolled lasagna, and Via Carota, where Taylor Swift recently toasted a breakup. There’s the Caliguladoes-Vegas fantasia that is Bad Roman, there’s Torrisi, and there is, above all else, Carbone.

Carbone is a place on the planet Earth— in fact, it’s a handful of places, with outposts in Dallas, Hong Kong, and elsewhere—but the original restaurant on Thompson Street may as well be Narnia. Unlike other secret pockets of the city, which are sequestered from the masses, Carbone is right there. It has a giant neon sign! While it lost its Michelin star last year, its spicy rigatoni vodka is by all accounts as creamy as ever, and the restaurant remains the archetype for a never-ending red-sauce revival. Carbone does accept reservations via Resy. I tried the other week and, with surprising ease, managed to find a table for two at 11:15 p.m. on a Wednesday.