Alinea's Rezzie System Changing To Next-Style E-Tickets

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By Kelly Dobkin

Grant Achatz, toque at Chicago's Alinea and Next, recently told The Huffington Post that his iconic cutting-edge restaurant Alinea is doing away with reservations and instead switching to an E-ticket system like its sister restaurant, Next. Yikes...looks like snagging a seat at this culinary mecca just got that much trickier.

So why are they switching? Apparently the tickets system cuts down on the risk of no-shows as they are non-refundable. Achatz tells HuffPo:"What people don't realize is that profit margins at restaurants are extremely small - between 5 and 15 percent, overall. Let's say you have a reservation for a four-top and at the last minute, one person gets sick. There goes your entire profit for that table. But with tickets, you solve that problem right away."

Yes, that means that soon you could see Alinea tickets on Craigslist getting auctioned off for double their face value, or even (shudder) scalpers outside the restaurant hawking tickets like a sold-out rock concert. The exact price of the tickets has not yet been determined but stay tuned for more details as they unfold.