You're trying to book a table and you can't get a reservation. The only times available on the apps are either 5 p.m. or 10:30 p.m., or every possible slot is gone, even though you logged on at midnight, weeks in advance.

This isn't just New York or Los Angeles anymore. In cities across the country, high-end restaurants seem increasingly hard to get into.

To blame is a flurry of dealmaking among reservation apps and credit cards, as well as a booming industry of middlemen -- all of whom are fighting over access to high-spending diners who account for around a quarter of the roughly $1.5 trillion Americans spend eating out, federal data shows.

Reservation apps are competing to sign up restaurants with the goal of locking in tables exclusively for their top users. Then there are membership clubs popping up for people who are willing to pay extra to secure tables and cut the line. And credit-card companies are paying restaurants for blocks of early seats so they can offer coveted reservations as a perk for their cardholders.

On top of that, there is a new secondary market for apps and bots that promise to get around the original reservation apps. And delivery companies have even joined the fray, with Uber Eats partnering with the granddaddy of reservation apps, OpenTable, and DoorDash buying SevenRooms, a reservation-management system geared toward higher-end restaurants, for $1.2 billion last year.

Scott Weiner, head of Fifth/50 Group, a Chicago-based network of restaurants and cocktail bars including Kindling and the Berkshire Room, has received offers of tens of thousands of dollars in total from the major reservation apps. One pitch he passed on for an exclusive partnership was for roughly $15,000 in cash, plus an event to showcase his restaurants, he said.

"Ten thousand doesn't really do anything to me," Weiner said.

The slicing and dicing of available tables can mean there are only so many seats at the most sought-after establishments, begetting a sense of scarcity at the highest levels.

"My personal view is that money invested in restaurants is a good thing. Full stop," said Pablo Rivero, the CEO of Resy, which was purchased in 2019 by American Express and has since started offering money to high-end restaurants for exclusivity or table access.

He said the app-on-app competition only applies to a small percentage of restaurants and that the fervor over exclusive restaurant access is part of a broader cultural phenomenon, much like the long lines that form for popular doughnuts or bubble tea.

OpenTable, which has partnerships with Visa and Chase, said less than 1% of the 70,000 restaurants on its platform are paid to hold tables for their dining access programs.

John Winterman, co-owner of Francie, a Michelin-starred restaurant in the hip Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg in New York, embraces as many of the apps as his diners do. On a recent Friday night, he was swiping through a tablet, showing four different interfaces of reservation apps. "We're married to Resy, but we have OpenTable, SevenRooms and also Yelp as our mistresses," he said with some audible fatigue.

"I just want to take advantage and meet the customer where they are," he added.

For most restaurants, even the very high-end ones, working with the apps is a matter of survival. The cost of labor, food and other operations have skyrocketed in recent years, further eroding the industry's famously razor-thin margins. Full-service restaurants reported a median income before taxes of 2.8% of sales last year, with expenses up 36% from before the pandemic, according to the National Restaurant Association trade group.

"If you look at how restaurants as an industry have evolved in the last 25 years, you're looking at an industry where the top-line sales have grown massively," said Ben Leventhal, a co-founder of Resy, who now runs Blackbird, a restaurant loyalty and rewards app.

But the bottom lines on the accounting ledgers darken the view considerably. "The numbers around profitability in restaurants that have come out from 2025 are staggering," Leventhal said. "Almost half of all restaurants are not profitable."

Empty tables are lost money for restaurants. There are reservation apps that let restaurants charge diners who don't show or cancel within a certain time period. But some restaurateurs grouse that the apps also make diners feel removed from a restaurant and more blase about canceling, and less likely to just walk in.

Some establishments have hired executives to manage all the technology needed to power reservations, customer relations and online ordering, said Chris DeSaye, vice president of Information Technology for Gibsons Restaurant Group.

"You need 85 pieces of technology and a guy like me," said DeSaye, whose company has around 700 tables across 14 restaurants for booking. "It's one of the requirements of the business."

Restaurants once lived and died by their reservation books, big manual records of tables and times typically managed by hosts.

That started to change in 1998, when San Francisco-based entrepreneur Chuck Templeton started OpenTable, which allowed diners to secure a reservation online. Many restaurants were skeptical at first, but OpenTable went so far as to help secure internet connections for establishments.

The pitch to restaurants "was getting more butts on seats," Templeton said, along with better customer tracking. It typically charged the eateries $1 per diner seated, as well as software fees.

OpenTable grew to thousands of participating restaurants by the mid 2000s, and introduced its first iPhone app in 2008. The company went public in 2009, with a more than $430 million valuation and partnerships with more than 10,000 restaurants. By the time travel giant Priceline bought OpenTable in 2014, it served more than 30,000 restaurants and was valued at $2.6 billion.

By 2015, as smartphones became ubiquitous, competitors like Resy, Tock, Reserve and SevenRooms pitched slicker apps for customers and iPad interfaces for restaurants, along with better business terms and access to diner data for establishments.

Acquisitions and deals with credit cards followed. In 2019, American Express bought Resy in part to court younger spenders and get its cards accepted by more restaurants. Resy users got annual credit through American Express to use at the restaurants partnered with the platform, along with early access to reservations and invites to special events.

In 2024, OpenTable struck a deal with Visa to provide cardholders exclusive access to coveted tables at hundreds of U.S. restaurants. It also partnered with Chase last year to give restaurant benefits to those who paid $795 annually for Sapphire Reserve cards, including $300 in restaurant credits a year and access to prime time reservations and events.

"We got into this game that we didn't invent but was necessary to play," Debby Soo, CEO of OpenTable, said of the financial incentives.

Soo took the job in 2020 with a mission: fix the platform's relationship with restaurants. She ditched just charging restaurants per seated table, negotiated more flexible deals, and updated the company's clunky technology.

That wasn't enough for OpenTable to get the highly coveted restaurants back on the platform, Soo said. So OpenTable offered cash incentives courtesy of their credit-card partners to win them back -- which worked, Soo said.

In 2025, OpenTable won high-profile New York City restaurants from Resy including Gage & Tollner and Don Angie, according to NYC RSVPs, a crowdsourced tracker of reservations started by a programmer, MB Samuel, who created the tool in 2024 after struggling to get tables in the West Village.

The delivery platform DoorDash entered the arms race last year when it bought SevenRooms. Restaurant owners say they have been offered five to seven figure sums to switch to SevenRooms since then.

The company also began pitching a free service to restaurants earlier this year that would pool reservations across platforms, so that restaurant staff no longer had to toggle among apps. (OpenTable says the service violates their terms of service; SevenRooms says it is a matter of choice for the restaurant.)

"Operators have been absorbing that complexity themselves, manually, every night. That should not be the standard," said SevenRooms' CEO Joel Montaniel.

"One of the reasons why you see restaurants hopping and skipping back and forth between platforms is that they're slightly dissatisfied," said Mike Anthony, executive chef at Gramercy Tavern in New York City. "Restaurants are not finding a solution to their problems and not feeling satisfied and have the feeling that they're missing out on market share."

The layers of technology have led to consumer confusion about how and where to make reservations. In some cases, a restaurant will seem fully booked when, in reality, the restaurant simply appears on an app that doesn't have access to its tables. A crop of middlemen are now capitalizing on this bewilderment.

Tarek Arafat was pulling his hair out trying to get reservations for hot New York City restaurants when he and co-founder Frank Besson created TableOne, an app that scrapes online reservations the second they are released and makes them accessible to TableOne members. Now, roughly 10,000 subscribers pay $129 a year for the service in eight cities.

Liz Luciano, an executive assistant to New York City financial and real-estate firms, frequently has to secure reservations for in-demand restaurants like The Corner Store or The Polo Bar for her bosses.

She recently tried to sign up for Dorsia, a new members-only platform that provides premium reservations for steep fees and is named for the impossible-to-book restaurant in the Bret Easton Ellis book "American Psycho."

Despite handling reservations for real-estate brokers who spend thousands of dollars on client dinners, she was told that the app was full, and another time, that it was highly selective. Dorsia members join at three different membership tiers -- which affect members' access to prime places at prime times -- in limited markets that include Aspen, St. Barts, Ibiza, Martha's Vineyard, and the Hamptons. Not everyone can get the hottest restaurant for a Saturday night; lower-tier members may have to settle for a Tuesday.

"We have to become the miracle workers," said Luciano, adding that in her view, the restaurants "have moved so far away from the clients."

Other sites, including Apartment Trader, auction off reservations made by AI bots or digitally savvy entrepreneurs. Bidding can hit hundreds or even thousands of dollars. (Scalpers have also gotten into the reservation resell business.) Roughly half a dozen states, including Illinois and New York, have tried to crack down by passing bans on reservation reselling.

To keep its most loyal patrons from becoming alienated, Francie is one of the many restaurants now offering house accounts or memberships that give guests a way to make reservations directly, even at the last minute.

"I'm a little bit of the old school of cultivating regulars and getting people to want to come back to you," Winterman, the owner of Francie, said. "And when I dine out, I tend to go to places I've been."

Still, he acknowledged a modern dynamic has crept into his own life. "My wife and I have multiple cards depending on airline points or hotel points or cashback awards," he said. "If a restaurant's on Resy, I make the reservation through my Resy account because I get dining credit for American Express Platinum."

To cut through the confusion, Anthony, the executive chef at Gramercy Tavern, suggests an old-school tactic: Pick up the phone and call.

"What most people don't fully understand is that we have a 10 to 15% cancellation and no-show rate in every restaurant in New York City," he said. "Restaurants are very eager and yearning to get those tables filled."