Dianne de Guzman is the regional editor for Eater’s Northern California/Pacific Northwest sites, writing about restaurant and bar trends, upcoming openings, and pop-ups for the San Francisco Bay Area, Portland, Seattle, and Denver.
Many of California’s restaurants require a reservation for dinner, and for the state’s harder-to-get tables, black market reservation websites have only made things more difficult — and more expensive — for diners to get in the door. Sites like Appointment Trader sell reservations to the biggest restaurants across the country, including those in California’s own backyard, like fine dining establishments the French Laundry or Funke in Beverly Hills, even House of Prime Rib in San Francisco. Now, California is joining a slew of states taking steps to regulate the industry.
In December, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed the Restaurant Reservation Anti-Piracy Act into law, making it the first state to ban third-party websites from profiting off gamifying reservation platforms like OpenTable, Resy, Tock, and SevenRooms. In February, California followed suit with the introduction of Assembly Bill 1245 on Wednesday, February 26, which would “prohibit third-party reservation services from arranging unauthorized reservations, putting an end to a predatory marketplace that exploits customers and harms small businesses,” per a press release from Assemblymember Catherine Stefani (D-San Francisco), who’s sponsoring the legislation. Other states, such as Illinois, Nevada, and Florida are also seeking their own measures to prevent companies from selling restaurant reservations…