Taylor Swift seats aren’t the one tickets being resold at a premium by less-than-scrupulous hustlers.
Reservations at Yoshino, a 10-seat Michelin-starred sushi bar on the Bowery, are being scalped for nearly $700 apiece, per a representative for the restaurant.
To enjoy sushi master Tadashi Yoshida’s renowned omakase, diners must book on the Tock platform and pay a $500 per person deposit.
The actual meal, including tax and repair but not drinks, costs $646 per person.
In accordance with correspondence viewed by The Post between Yoshino general manager Mayumi Kobayashi and representatives from Tock, the restaurant was tipped off by an everyday customer.
Reportedly, reservations — that are currently booked a month out — were being sold in a closed group called Little Red Book on a Chinese version of Twitter, by someone using the name Winters Wang, amongst other aliases.
“He’s tacking on one other $180 per seat,” Kobayashi wrote to Tock, alerting the corporate of the difficulty. “Looks like he’s making quite a killing hawking reservations.”
With the whistleblower’s help, Kobayashi was capable of obtain screenshots from the closed group, which revealed Wang’s methods — not to say the incontrovertible fact that he has supposedly been scalping seats at other top NYC restaurants like Le Bernardin, Nakaji and Kappo Sono.
The scalper appears to be using a string of names, log-ins and email addresses — but in enough cases, the identical exact bank card, which made the against-the-rules act easier to identify.
The depth of the issue became apparent last month, when Kobayashi sent an email to Wang, letting him know that it was against restaurant policy to transfer a reservation, after it was revealed that one other party was dining under his name.
A lengthy email from Wang, written in broken English, blamed confusion which “happened personally between me and my friend,” but then went on to chastise the restaurant, offering “a small advice” to permit diners to pass reservations on to others.
(Wang didn’t reply to The Post for comment.)
Because Kobayashi was capable of gain access to the private group where the resales were going down, she was capable of go to Tock with the evidence she needed to get scores of bookings made by Wang cancelled. Resale of reservations is a violation of the location’s terms of service.
In response to the frustrating scenario, Tock director of promoting Marisa Mulh told The Post “although not specifically related to Yoshino, we’re aware that this happens and highly discourage it.”
“Reservation resale hinders [a restaurant’s] ability to leverage guest preferences which is central to the experiences they’re offering,” she said.
Beyond that, it also does an extreme disservice to customers, in response to Andrew Rigie, executive director of the Latest York City Hospitality Alliance.
“If you’ve gotten scalpers on the market which might be snagging up reservations, [that] makes it tougher for the on a regular basis person to get [in],” Rigie told The Post. “It makes restaurants, especially hot restaurants, even less accessible.”
Kobayashi and the Yoshino team, who declined to comment for this text, are considering legal motion.
