On a recent Tuesday evening at 4 Charles Prime Rib, in the West Village, shortly after my party of four had settled in for dinner, a man who bore the gentle air of owning the place arrived at a neighboring table. As our server delivered our cocktails, she gestured at him and said, with a wink, “This is Gary. He’s a regular. I’m so sorry you have to sit next to him. Let me know if you want me to put up a curtain to block him out.” Everyone laughed. “Gary’s full of wisdom,” the maître d’ added as he passed by. Gary—round but trim, with a shaved, shiny pate and a distinct Long Island accent—smirked and said, “Yeah, like, drink a Martini if you’re driving, and tequila if you’re not.”

Gary is more than a regular at 4 Charles; he’s one of only a few people who can get a table there at all. The restaurant is ostensibly open to the public, but if you’re not Gary—or Taylor Swift, whom Gary told me he’d been seated next to a few nights prior—you’re probably not getting in. According to more than one thread on Reddit, your chances of booking a reservation even the instant a batch of them is released on Resy, at 9 A.M. each day, are slim to none. By the restaurant’s calculations, you’d be competing with anywhere from nine hundred to fifteen hundred other hopefuls. Moreover, nearly half the tables in the very small dining room are already reserved, for “standing guests,” like Gary.

Gary has a reservation every Friday, but he likes to pop in on Monday or Tuesday, too—“so they don’t forget about me,” he said. “And to annoy them.” That he has the appetite for this is a feat. The menu at 4 Charles is an extravagant appeal to one’s inner child, which is to say that it could have been drawn up by Richie Rich. The baked potatoes are fully loaded, crowned with glistening lardons of maple-glazed bacon; the enormous hot-fudge sundae comes surrounded by piles of candy. Our server suggested a cheeseburger for the table, as a mid-course between sizzling shrimp scampi and a bone-in rib eye, and when it arrived she put on a white glove to cut it carefully into quarters.

At the end of the meal, Gary sent over an off-menu dessert of his own design: pie on pie, a slice of cartoonishly tall lemon-meringue balanced atop a slice of chocolate-cream. As the owner and operator of a trucking business, he explained, he needs an impressive place to bring clients. When I asked him if he’d been to Rao’s, in East Harlem, New York’s most famous restaurant-that’s-actually-a-club, he waved his hand. “My clients can get themselves into Rao’s,” he said. “This is the new Rao’s.”

I got myself into Rao’s a few weeks later, with the help of a young chef and restaurateur named Max Chodorow. For Chodorow, whose father is the restaurateur Jeffrey Chodorow, known for the bygone hot spots Asia de Cuba and China Grill, getting a table at Rao’s is fairly easy. He just has to check in with Carol Nelson, a family friend who has held a standing reservation for decades: every Tuesday, she has the first booth on the left, which is hung with her photograph. When she can’t use it herself, she donates it to be auctioned off for charity—it can fetch tens of thousands of dollars—or offers it to a friend.

I’d asked Chodorow and Ashwin Deshmukh, his partner in a Manhattan restaurant called Jean’s, to bring me to Rao’s to discuss an observation of mine. The question I’m asked most frequently, as someone who writes about restaurants, is “Where should I eat?” A close second is “Why is it so hard to make a reservation?” Every generation of New York restaurants includes a few establishments whose tables are notoriously elusive, and I’d long seen those places—say, Carbone or the Polo Bar—as rarities. But in recent years a growing number of restaurants seemed to shift toward the Rao’s model, effectively functioning as private clubs.

Suddenly, getting into any place with even a little buzz required knowing someone, or applying to use Dorsia, an app that grants seats to users who agree to pay a large, nonrefundable sum toward each bill. (It shares a name with the fictional, ultra-exclusive restaurant in “American Psycho.”) A week or so before my night at Rao’s, I’d gone to Frog Club, the impossible reservation du jour, which had just opened in the space formerly occupied by the infamous speakeasy Chumley’s. The only way to get a table was to e-mail an address that has since been removed from the restaurant’s Web site; when I arrived, a bouncer stationed outside the door placed branded stickers over my phone camera. I’d also attended a birthday dinner at Prune, Gabrielle Hamilton’s beloved East Village restaurant, which has been closed to the public since the start of the pandemic but is, for now, available for private parties at Hamilton’s discretion. (She pours the champagne towers herself.)

“The best reason to run a functionally private restaurant in New York is also the saddest reason,” Deshmukh told me, as we ate seafood salad and roasted sweet peppers strewn with golden raisins and pine nuts. In the face of inflation and exorbitant rents, “it’s easier to focus on the six hundred people who can pay your bills than on serving the masses.” When your tables are reserved only by regulars, he added, “the number of no-shows goes to zero.” Plus, “you can involve your diners in the conspiracy of it all, at a premium. ‘This fresco olive oil? It’s just for you, because you are such a good customer. That’s fifty dollars, please!’ ” (A few weeks later, the Times ran a story alleging that Deshmukh has made a habit of fleecing investors and misrepresenting himself in business dealings; he told me, without getting into specifics, that many of the accusations are untrue.)

Some diners are proving eager to pony up for the privilege of spending more money. A new dining rewards system called Blackbird, created by Ben Leventhal, one of Resy’s founders, allows users to open a “house account” at certain restaurants, essentially prepaying for meals. Last year, Major Food Group, the consortium behind Carbone, opened ZZ’s Club in Hudson Yards, with memberships starting at thirty thousand dollars, plus ten thousand in annual dues. One of the club’s restaurants is Carbone Privato, a souped-up version of the original, which I visited as a guest. Amid a circus of tableside preparations—servers theatrically shaking Martinis and flambéing cherries—diners sized up one another, eyes darting around the room suspiciously. An especially anointed few slunk over to the Founders’ Room, where a “culinary concierge” will arrange for the kitchen to prepare anything a member desires; recent requests, according to the club’s director, have included a faithful re-creation of a Pizza Hut pie.

Chodorow is wary of club-ifying his own businesses, despite the clear financial incentives. “The premise is so uninteresting to me—to go hang out with the same three hundred rich people for the next ten years?” he told me, at Rao’s. It was a funny thing to say, given where we were, but part of that restaurant’s appeal is a lack of conspicuous status markers. The dining room is defiantly unpolished; there were Christmas decorations still strung above the bar in February. Our server, sitting backward on a chair that he’d pulled up to our table, recited the family-style menu from memory, then probed our order with expert collegiality. Were we sure we wanted that much mozzarella? Instead of a second white pasta, how about one with red sauce? When someone selected “My Girl,” by the Temptations, from the digital jukebox, almost everyone sang along.

It was an atmosphere I’ve hardly ever encountered in New York’s most vaunted dining rooms—more “When you’re here, you’re family” than “How did you get in?” But I’d found something similar at an acclaimed members-only restaurant called Palizzi Social Club, in a row house on a residential block in South Philly. Before the chef Joey Baldino took it over, in 2016, Palizzi went by its full name, Filippo Palizzi Societa di Mutuo Soccorso di Vasto. It was founded in 1918, as an all-purpose gathering place, by a group of Italian immigrants from a small town in Abruzzo. Baldino wanted to turn the Societa into a more conventional restaurant, but he was moved to honor its history. He kept it private while also making it less exclusive, capping the number of memberships but otherwise offering them to anyone who wanted one, for just twenty dollars each.

I had dinner there recently with a big group of friends, about half of whom were members. Standing outside, I felt vaguely like I was doing something clandestine. The glass front door opened onto an empty foyer that glowed red; past that was another door, outfitted with a speakeasy-style window the size of a mail slot, for a bouncer to peer through. I’d been advised to bring a fat wad of cash—like Rao’s, Palizzi does not accept credit cards—and I was conscious of my wallet’s unusual bulge.

Inside, the mood was relaxed and convivial. Details that might have felt gimmicky somewhere else—a black-and-white checkered floor, a vintage cigarette machine by the bar, servers dressed in Rat Pack-era uniforms (a neighborhood singer who specializes in Frank Sinatra performs regularly)—read as charming here. The clientele seemed to represent the neighborhood, dressed casually and ranging from Zoomers to boomers. We had barely looked at the menu before plates of food began to arrive: escarole and beans; lollipop lamb chops; spaghetti with blue crab. To my surprise, my favorite was the calamari and peas, an old family recipe of Baldino’s. The dish, a slightly soupy mix of canned sweet peas, tender rings of squid, and mini pasta shells, showered in Pecorino, struck me as rare but not rarefied—a privilege worth preserving. ♦