From Collingswood to Atlantic City, restaurant owners want people to stop selling their reservations. The practice could soon be banned in New Jersey

Having trouble securing a reservation at Hearthside in Collingswood this Saturday night? Offer a bid between $125-$225, and someone can help you with that.

But Dominic Piperno, the chef-owner of Hearthside and a Cherry Hill native, had no idea that was an option at his own business.

“That’s wild,” he said, seeing Hearthside listed on Appointment Trader — a website where people can sell restaurant reservations — for the first time.

“I don’t like that at all,” he added.

This week, the New Jersey Assembly and Senate unanimously passed a bill that would ban third parties from listing, promoting, or selling reservations to restaurants without their permission. It enacts steep fines for violators, and mirrors bills that have quickly popped up across the country, after a restaurant reservation following the New Orleans Super Bowl sold online for $2,000.

The bill is now on Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill’s desk for her consideration.

Hearthside, a reservation-only wood-fired restaurant with a tasting menu, fills up its prime weekend dinner spots two weeks in advance. But Piperno doesn’t want customers paying an extra price tag to dine with him.

“People shouldn’t be making money off of someone else’s restaurant,” he said.

If Sherrill signs the ban into law, Appointment Trader will stop offering restaurant reservations in the state – just like it’s done in New York and Philadelphia.

That would be good news to Joe Lautato, the owner at Cafe 2825, a popular Italian restaurant in Atlantic City.

Lautato said there’s been confusion at the door on a nightly basis as diners show up whose names don’t match their reservations. He sometimes calls the number on the reservation, and never gets an answer.

“We scramble and ask for phone numbers to verify, but the end result is that we now have a controversy at the door that we don’t want to have, and we feed them anyway,” Lautato said.

He doesn’t want to turn people away knowing they traveled from Cherry Hill or Tom’s River for a special occasion. But the overflow means he’s turning down regulars whose business matters the most, he said.

Lautato said he overheard a customer saying they purchased their reservation, but he didn’t know how, or where.

It was likely on Appointment Trader. Cafe 2825 ranks the third most booked restaurant in all of New Jersey on the site, according to Jonas Frey, who founded the website in 2021.

Users on Appointment Trader can buy and sell restaurant reservations, doctor appointments, concert tickets, and access to golf clubs, though the New Jersey bill only applies to restaurant reservations.

It’s exactly the kind of service New Jersey legislators want to get rid of before an anticipated World Cup tourism boom.

Let’s just say Frey won’t miss New Jersey much if Sherrill supports the ban.

He said his company has hosted just 600 transactions in the whole state across 93 restaurants. As a point of comparison, Appointment Trader had more than 72,000 transactions in New York before the state banned it.

“We have restaurants where we did substantially more revenue in one quarter in one restaurant than the entirety of time in the state of New Jersey,” said Frey, who lives in Miami and says his business has been embraced internationally.

Assembly member Carol Murphy, a Burlington County Democrat who cosponsored the bill, said her district is right off of major highways and expects a surge in tourists staying and eating in Philly’s South Jersey suburbs for the World Cup, 250th celebrations, and sail boat races along the Delaware River.

“We have all of these major events coming up and to start seeing people trying to scalp reservations, especially because we are so close to Philadelphia, I would hate to see any of my constituents, or any New Jerseyans, get taken advantage of,” she said.

Murphy said selling reservations is fraudulent. But Frey, who’s from Germany and has lived in the United States for a decade, argued banning reservation sales is “unAmerican.”

“If you have something, you should be able to trade it in a free economy,” he said. Frey said he changed the rules on his website years ago to prevent people from buying up reservations in bulk, and that people now use his website to regain cancellation fees if they can’t make their reservations. But users seek out reservations on the site by offering bids to “concierges” to help them out.

The top booked restaurants on Appointment Trader in N.J., according to Frey:

Giumarello’s Restaurant & G Bar in Haddon Township has also been used on the site.

The legislators behind this bill aren’t claiming restaurant reservation scalping has become a major problem in the state, but they want to prevent it from becoming one, said Assembly member Katie Brennan, a Jersey City Democrat sponsoring the bill.

“It’s a little bit preemptive, because we have not seen it en masse in New Jersey yet, but it is growing,” Brennan said.

“We don’t always have to wait until something is bad,” she added.

Other sites have popped up offering similar services, like Cita, a marketplace for buying and selling reservations, and subscription services Waitlist Wizard and Table Swap, which help people obtain reservations.

The legislation could also prevent individuals booking up reservations and trying to sell them on Facebook, according to the office of Sen. Kristin Corrado, a North Jersey Republican and prime sponsor of the bill.

Piperno, the owner of Hearthside, said it’s flattering people have so much interest in his restaurant that they’re buying reservations, but he’s weirded out by “some internet prowler, just like hawking reservations, just so that they can make 100 bucks off of somebody.”