Student Alex earned 65,000 euros in one year by making reservations in restaurants but never eating there

Reserve tables in restaurants, but never eat there yourself. For example, student Alex Eisler earned no less than 65,000 euros last year.

Everyone has to eat and anyone who stays in New York likes to do so at a restaurant. But booking a spot at that one Italian with his homemade pasta, or that other burger joint where they serve the best meat, is a serious challenge nowadays. The Big Apple. Many join the online queue virtually, others even try to bribe staff, he said The New Yorker.

Alex Eisler, a second-year applied mathematics student at Brown University, is also one of those people standing in line, hoping for a spot. But not for himself. He is a so-called reseller: people who reserve places in restaurants and then sell them on, often for a lot of money.

“Sometimes they recognize my voice, so I have to use different accents. And sometimes I have to act like a girl,” he says about reserving tables at The New Yorker. “I have a few Resy accounts that have female names.” On Resy you can find restaurants nearby and then make reservations. After the reservation is in order, Eisler goes to ‘Appointment Trader’, a platform on which reservations for hotels, bars and restaurants can be exchanged for money.

READ ALSO. Turkey wants to protect traditional döner kebab against cheap ‘counterfeit’

65,000 euros

Under the name ‘GloriousSeed75’, Eisler recently sold a table at the French restaurant Maison Close in Soho for 855 dollars or almost 800 euros. A reservation at Carbone, where you pay between 50 and 100 euros for a dish with meat and dessert costs 17 euros, recently earned him 980 euros. Justin and Hailey Bieber were banned from the latter restaurant in 2022 because they showed up without a reservation.

In total, Eisler earned more than 65,000 euros last year simply by reselling reservations.