The Social

Old school meets new school: Mister Softee and the Mud Truck.

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET)

NEW YORK--Goat cheese is the new black. Introducing goat cheese cheesecake, asserted the Twitter account for a Manhattan food outlet called the Dessert Truck one morning in April, a few hours before it opened up shop at its semi-regular haunt on the corner of St. Mark's Place and Third Avenue.

The Dessert Truck is usually in good company. Walk out of the Astor Place subway station into Cooper Square, the gateway to the St. Mark's and Bowery nightlife strips, and depending on the time of day you can buy a cup of coffee, an order of Thai chicken, a Belgian waffle drowning in whipped cream, or a cone of local-ingredients-only ice cream--or, for that matter, goat cheese cheesecake--without ever setting foot inside a storefront. If you ask whether you'll find them there the next day, your server will likely tell you to keep tabs on the truck's Twitter account.

Cooper Square is a local hot spot for gourmet food trucks, a phenomenon that's been making headlines in cities like New York and Los Angeles for about two years now. And more recently, these roving food outlets found a promotional niche on the Web thanks to the rise of Twitter, which lets them broadcast their changing location, advertise deals, and keep up a customer base. It fits: were there a culinary embodiment of short-and-sweet Twitter, it would be the food truck, mobile and ultra-niche and in the midst of broad yuppie popularity that some say will be a lasting cult following and some are still pegging as a fad. Plus, at least in certain U.S. cities, they're pretty much unavoidable.

Kogi verde is coming to Koreatown! Wilshire and Ardmore! @ 11.45. Bring it! announced the Twitter account for Kogi BBQ, a Los Angeles purveyor of Korean barbecue tacos, Thursday night. The first Kogi BBQ truck (and accompanying Twitter account, which now has more than 20,000 followers) debuted in November, and the company is now about to increase its numbers from two to four trucks. Each Kogi truck regularly experiences hundreds of customers per night and sometimes even runs out of tacos.

"People search for it," said Alice Shin, Kogi BBQ's in-house blogger and Twitterer. "It's kind of like a treasure hunt for them."

Once restricted to hot dogs of questionable quality hawked on busy city corners and to Mister Softee ice cream vans drifting sleepily down tree-lined suburban streets, food trucks have ventured into yuppie culture. In New York you can go to the taxicab-yellow Wafels and Dinges truck and spend $7 for a "WMD" or "Wafel of Mass Deliciousness," a chewy Belgian waffle piled with as many confectionary toppings as you could possibly want. The cream-colored Van Leeuwen Ice Cream truck will serve you flavors like ginger and red currant, donating part of the proceeds to a nonprofit that supports endangered mountain gorillas. The Rickshaw truck sells Asian-inspired dumplings. Somewhere in the city there's even an Anarchist Ice Cream Truck that hands out political pamphlets.

In Los Angeles, the Cool Haus truck sells wacky ice cream sandwiches, and the Heartschallenger truck will hand out music samplers. Portland, Ore., is about to get its own Korean taco truck, called Koi Fusion, and hundreds of people are already tracking it on Twitter. This week, San Francisco is slated to get a new food truck of its own when French restaurant Chez Spencer unleashes a Twittering vehicle that sells, among other things, frog legs on-the-go.

Not every gourmet food truck uses Twitter. But for the ones that do, the microblogging service is usually an integral part of their nascent success stories.

"Twitter first had a practical purpose of telling people where we were," said Wafels and Dinges founder Thomas DeGeest. The waffle vendor's Twitter account now has more than 1,200 followers. "They'd call us 'the elusive waffle truck' because we'd show up, and the next day we'd be gone, and nobody knew where we were." DeGeest, who specialized in social-networking consulting at IBM for years, bought a 1968-vintage hot dog truck two years ago, and spent three months turning it into the Wafels and Dinges truck. He began to use Twitter about a year later.

"Sometimes we have a secret password, or sometimes we have a challenge," DeGeest said. "One of my guys came up with a challenge earlier this week to come and do an impersonation of a peacock." The reward is typically a free topping (or "dinges," the Belgian term for it), and DeGeest said that yes, people actually show up and do it.

Wafels and Dinges typically makes two stops each day: one in a business district during the workday, usually in midtown or outside the New York Life Insurance building on Park Avenue South, and one in a shopping district like SoHo or Union Square. The responses to Twitter challenges and "secret passwords," DeGeest said, are much more likely to come during the workday.

"Something we see that with the office locations is that people are spending their days behind the computer, and we get more response to the Twitterers," he explained. "I don't have numbers, but I don't think a lot of our customers are mobile Twitterers. I think from what I see, most of them must be onscreen."

Kogi BBQ's Shin also testified to the benefits of Twitter to boost business.

"When we went to the UCLA restaurant industry conference, nobody knew we were going to be there or where we were going to park that day," Shin said. "I Twittered that we were there at the hotel, and within two minutes it was kind of like 'Night of the Living Dead' when you see zombies. I saw all these people walking out of buildings toward the truck, and they were all looking at their phones and BlackBerrys...it was sort of both cool and creepy."

Marketing in the Digital Age
Both Twitter and the food truck craze are, in a sense, testaments to the mobility and spontaneity enabled by the Digital Age. And ultimately, they also may have their best niche as marketing vehicles (no pun intended) rather than standalone businesses.

The Mud Trucks, for example, are a small fleet of brazen orange vehicles known for parking conspicuously right outside Starbucks outlets in downtown Manhattan. They've long had a physical storefront among the vintage boutiques of Ninth Street in the East Village. The Rickshaw dumpling truck, on the converse, has always been a mobile outpost of a mini-chain of dumpling shops. Van Leeuwen ice cream, meanwhile, is now sold in Whole Foods supermarkets, and Wafels and Dinges may be doing something similar soon.

"My strategy is not to build an empire of food trucks," DeGeest said. "I have actually retail products that I put on the market too...prepackaged waffles to sell in stores, and I'm looking at bringing a waffle mix on the market that allows people to make waffles that are very close to our original Belgian waffles at home."

The Wafels and Dinges truck, ultimately, is "kind of like an In-N-Out Burger trailer, which is the biggest thing you can have at your party in L.A," DeGeest said.

Some of this may be connected to a problem that will sound all too familiar to Twitter experts: It's cheap and easy, relatively speaking, to launch a food truck business, but profitability becomes less of a guarantee when food trucks are at the mercy of community boards and municipal legislators.

"It's a lot easier to find a loophole and start a truck or a pop-up restaurant than an actual restaurant," said Paolo Lucchesi, San Francisco editor at restaurant blog network Eater. "Whether it's sustainable, that's yet to be seen, but in terms of starting a new project, there's a lot of things that you go around when you have a truck."

Some business owners in Sheridan Square, a quaint pocket of Greenwich Village dotted with retail storefronts and a small park, lobbied to restrict the presence of food trucks that could potentially undercut their rent-paying businesses. The bright orange Mud Truck has been temporarily booted from Sheridan Square at the request of none other than the local Starbucks.

In perhaps the most bizarre of these such incidents, a community message board for residents of northern Manhattan's Inwood neighborhood was a aflutter earlier this spring with complaints about a noisy ice cream truck playing its familiar jingle late on a weekend night: as one resident put it, "At this late hour this time of year I wonder if the truck is selling more than ice cream."

For food truck owners, dealing with both growth and complications can involve looking into more advanced and creative ways to use technology. Something you'll probably see soon, at least with some of the trucks, is a way to track them on a map using GPS.

"I'm actually talking to Sprint about (GPS tracking), and it's going to happen," DeGeest said. "We have a new truck coming out soon, our second truck. The second truck is coming out because I really thought that the '68 was going to die. It was in such bad shape that I finally bit the bullet and spent the money to put in a new transmission."

But he doesn't plan to give up on Twitter, the technology that really fueled the mobile food craze in the first place. "I don't think you can eliminate Twitter," DeGeest said. "You kind of maintain a dialogue with your customer. GPS can never do that for you."

Last Friday evening as the sun set, the Dessert Truck was opening up in its usual Cooper Square spot, goat cheese cheesecake still on the menu, as the Mud Truck shuttered its coffee sales for the day a block away. The Wafels and Dinges truck announced that it would be parked for the evening right off Washington Square Park, a stone's throw from the rowdy West Village watering holes frequented by college students who've just rolled into town for summer internships.

But if they're new to the city, they probably don't know yet that on this given night they can earn a free topping by telling the waffle vendor who their top three favorite fictional villains are.

In one of the most useful and engaging Web 2.0 productivity apps we've seen in ages, Bacolicious promises to make your browsing experience so very delicious by superimposing an image of a piece of tasty, tasty bacon over everything you navigate.

Here's how you use it: Type in the Bacolicious URL followed by the URL you would like to load. So, for example, http://bacolicio.us/http://icanhazcheezburger.com if you think that your grammatically challenged cat would like to have a bacon "cheezburger."

It's all part of the bizarre Internet meme centered on borderline cult worship of bacon, as seen in the rise of blogs like Bacon Bacon Bacon. See also: Pancakes. Now I'm really hungry.

Happy Friday.

(Credit: Burger King)

Facebook's developer platform has been used for a zillion marketing campaigns so far, but this one is actually dead-on hilarious.

Fast-food chain Burger King has created "Whopper Sacrifice," a Facebook app that will give you a coupon for a free hamburger if you delete 10 people from your friends list.

Burger King has put out some interesting campaigns as of late ("Whopper Virgin," "Subservient Chicken"), but this one piques our interest because of how gleefully it pokes fun at our social-networking obsessions. "Now is the time to put your fair-weather Web friendships to the test," the Whopper Sacrifice site explains. "Install Whopper Sacrifice on your Facebook profile, and we'll reward you with a free flame-broiled Whopper when you sacrifice ten of your friends.

The funniest part: The "sacrifices" show up in your activity feed. So it'll say, for example, "Caroline sacrificed Josh Lowensohn for a free Whopper." Unfortunately, you can't delete your whole friends list and eat free (however unhealthily) for a week. The promotion is limited to one coupon per Facebook account.

My Facebook friends had better appreciate the fact that I made a New Year's resolution to cut out red meat. Hint, hint.

There's no reason to panic at Google over the rumor that the perks-happy tech giant would be cutting back on free food for employees, we hear.

A source close to the company told CNET News that the rumors are really just spin over a small management decision. Google isn't depriving employees of dinner, the source explained. The issue was that several smaller eating establishments at the company's Silicon Valley campus had been seeing low attendance at dinner, and so their evening food service will be consolidated into a smaller number of cafeterias. The source said that steps are going to be taken so that nobody has to hike too much further to reach an open mess hall.

Additionally, the change does not affect any Google offices other than its main campus in Mountain View, Calif. Their cafeteria lineups will not change.

Google declined to confirm the source's information. "We are committed to Googlers and providing them a great working environment, but we don't comment on internal specifics," a PR representative told CNET News.

The change could be due to one of a few things: cost-effectiveness, or a legitimate issue with underattendance. Or, as one of my colleagues speculated, Googlers could've been picking up mass quantities of food and driving it home to their families.

Tastier than Boston Market--and free. You know you'd take advantage of it, too.

Blame the mounting economic pressures, or too many chubby engineers: Google has decided to stop offering free dinner, afternoon snacks, and its "tea trolley" to employees, according to an unconfirmed rumor floated on Valleywag.

A Google representative did not immediately return my request for comment, so this one is still hanging around in the gossip-sphere. But Valleywag reported that the changes are slated to be announced Monday, which would mean that either a confirmation or debunking should be available within hours.

A chef prepares Google food, back in 2004.

(Credit: Google)

Google has become renowned for its employee perks: massages, game rooms, gyms, laundry facilities, and free food three times a day. Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin went out on a limb in creating the free-food strategy, which they said was a worthwhile investment to make employees healthier, happier, and more efficient. The food's even good enough for Google's original head chef to have penned a cookbook.

Cutting perks always results in bad PR, something that Google learned the hard way when it shot the cost of day care for employees' kids into the stratosphere, for example. But cutting back on free food, one of Google's most visible and unique perks, may be over the top for some workers.

Critics of the perks have suggested, in addition to questioning the economic efficiency, that offering so much free food is really just a way to make Googlers spend more time at the office. Then there's the internal joke about the "Google 15" (or "Google 20" depending on who you ask), the rumored weight gain that happens after getting hired at Google and being surrounded by so much gratis grub.

Coincidentally, the gossip comes soon after the heavy blogging of a two-month-old Flickr photo that revealed Google's New York cafeteria serving bacon cheeseburgers on Krispy Kreme donuts as a novelty food. Hey, Googlers, maybe the rumored change is for your own good.

Still, this has not been confirmed, which means that it could easily turn out to be false, or perhaps overhyped (restricted to Google satellite offices, for example). But given the marketwide economic belt-tightening, it's not too hard to believe the rumor.

Bon appetit for Cooking.com: The kitchen appliance retailer announced Wednesday that it has pulled in $13 million in venture funding in a round led by Azure Capital Partners. ORIX Venture Finance also contributed venture debt to the round, and Azure partner Michael Kwatinetz is now on the company's board of directors.

The new cash will be used toward a variety of goals at Cooking.com: expand editorial and social-networking operations on the site (a sound decision when it seems like everyone can't stop talking about Bobby Flay and Mario Batali), opening a new distribution center in Ohio, and allowing more Web sites to offer "Powered by Cooking.com" stores. That's something that some food-related brands already do, like Starbucks, Pillsbury, and the Food Network.

The Santa Monica, Calif.-based Cooking.com has been around since 1998, still alive and kicking despite the fact that retail leviathan Amazon.com has been selling cooking appliances for years now.

"We are excited to have new investment partners and funding, which will allow us to enrich the Cooking.com experience and brand," founder and CEO Tracy Randall said in a release, "and also further our goal to increasingly become a driving e-commerce force for some of the world's most visited culinary sites." In other words, just as many media companies are pushing their content out to multiple video-sharing sites, niche commerce sites are hoping to hook up with more retailers.

The rest of the world might not know about it, but MenuPages, an online compendium of restaurant and take-out menus for eight major U.S. cities, is a pretty big deal in New York. But is it ripe for the picking? A source close to MenuPages told us that the Gotham-based start-up has been acquired, or is close to it, but didn't know who the buyer was, which means this one remains a rumor.

The ad-supported MenuPages, operated under the company name Slick City Media, runs local sites for New York to Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, the Miami region, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. According to Compete.com, the site pulls in over 300,000 visitors per month and has grown steadily since last year, although the chart shows a bit of a plateau.

Compete.com shows that unique visitors to MenuPages.com have grown since last year, but plateaued recently.

(Credit: Compete.com)

It's easy to see why someone with the available cash might want to buy it. A site like MenuPages provides opportunities for locally-targeted ads--literally down to the neighborhood--and the fact that people visit the site specifically to search for food means more opportunities for niche advertisers. And it's equally easy to see why the site management might want to cash out and move on: the company's been around since 2002, which is ancient in Web years.

So, assuming MenuPages is indeed a buyout target, who's the buyer? It's likely someone with interest in the local-search market, which means there are a few possibilities.

IAC/InterActiveCorp. Barry Diller's ocean liner of a Web conglomerate has made it through some stormy waters recently, and signs indicate that the New York company has resumed its feisty, pluck-em-up acquisition habits. Recently, IAC has purchased teen fashion site GirlSense and the parent company of Dictionary.com.

The thing you always read in IAC's acquisition announcements is that the company plans to integrate new buys with existing brands. And considering IAC operates local business directory Citysearch and would-be Google rival Ask, it seems like the most logical buyer for a site like MenuPages. But a source at IAC didn't know anything about a MenuPages acquisition, so this one remains a question mark.

AOL. Bebo aside, most of AOL's recent acquisitions have been in the advertising or technology space: widget maker Goowy, content-linking service Sphere, and ad firm Tacoda. Search doesn't seem to be at the top of its list right now. But it did buy a fantasy football site last month, so who knows?

Yahoo. Like AOL, Yahoo's focus in recent months has been advertising, not search. But even amid the Microsoft snafu, Yahoo still made a number of purchases itself, like Mac search aid Inquisitor and marketing analytics software IndexTools. If Yahoo still wants to grow its local-search options, this could be a nice pick for it. Still, unlikely.

Google. Probably not. Mountain View would likely prefer to serve MenuPages' ad space than own it. We all know Google just isn't known for content buys.

Yelp. The business reviews site is probably too small to make acquisitions, but it did raise another round of venture cash a few months ago, and providing menus alongside its restaurant reviews could give it a leg up over bigger rival Citysearch. Wildly popular in San Francisco, Yelp could use a MenuPages buy to broaden its footprint in New York--where it recently opened an office.

Somebody you haven't heard of. When it comes to New York start-ups, don't discount these guys. Around town there are new-media conglomerates, shopping-happy millionaires, and investment firms with a taste for majority stakes. And because there isn't a coherent culture of "tech" the way there is in the Bay Area, sometimes big names can fly under the radar entirely. Example: The Pilot Group, a firm spearheaded by former AOL exec Bob Pittman, has acquired or purchased majority stakes in a handful of niche content start-ups like locally-focused e-newsletters Thrillist and DailyCandy.

"Old" Media. Never rule it out. Sometimes they know what they're doing and sometimes, well, they don't. Either way, city-focused buys could be on the rise: NBC Universal showed an appetite for locally-flavored purchases when early this year it purchased LX Networks, maker of New York and L.A.-oriented video programming.

A jar of Google hot sauce and a few dishes from the 'Food 2.0' cookbook by former Google chef Charlie Ayers.

(Credit: David Karp)

(Credit: Amazon)

I was lost somewhere in the labyrinthine corridors of a sprawling Whole Foods supermarket, looking for foods I'd never known existed--Tamarind paste? Daikon sprouts? Pomegranate molasses? It was a humbling reminder that you can't Google everything.

Let me explain: I recently procured a copy of Food 2.0: Secrets From the Chef Who Fed Google, a compendium of food tips and recipes from Charlie Ayers, the ex-Grateful Dead caterer who was hired by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1999. And I was eager to put it to the test. Google has made it easier for me to find anything I want on the Web, share documents, e-mail, read the news, and plan my schedule--basically, Google's made it possible for me to pretend I'm organized. But could the teachings of its former executive chef make it easier for me to pretend I know how to cook?

Chopping up habanero peppers for the Google hot sauce recipe.

(Credit: Scott Kidder)

According to Food 2.0, cooking and eating has more to do with Google's vision of organizing all the world's information than you might think. The young Mountain View entrepreneurs wanted a chef, Ayers explains in a foreword, because they wanted to boost productivity and innovation. "At Google, Sergey and Larry believed that if everyone were eating healthy and eating well, they were going to have healthy, productive, happy, and efficient engineers working for them," wrote Ayers, who left Google in 2005 and is currently in the process of opening a restaurant. "It made sense for them as a business investment, even if there were cheaper alternatives available."

Jade smoothies: cucumber, apple cider, lemon sorbet, and mint.

(Credit: David Karp)

What Ayers brought to the Google table ultimately made the company's free-food offerings legendary, and in the process, more or less destroyed the common wisdom that engineers and software developers restrict their diets to pizza and ramen noodles.

So, Food 2.0 is a ridiculously healthy cookbook in the most Northern California sense possible. There's a page where Ayers describes his devotion to the hippie juice known as wheatgrass, the entire "breakfast" chapter is essentially a catalog of smoothie and granola recipes, and just about everything involves fresh fruits and vegetables. The utter hippie-ness of it all was summed up by the distressed expression on one of my friends' faces as he flipped through Food 2.0 and said, "There's like, no butter in any of these recipes."

That's both good and bad. I'll touch upon the "bad" first. The heavy reliance on fresh produce means that, in light of rising food prices, this might not be the most cost-effective cookbook you'll find. It also means that you'll be working with a lot of perishable foods, which you often have to figure out how to budget throughout the next few days so that leftover fruits and vegetables don't go to waste. Chopping up lettuce and onions additionally takes up counter space, which I don't have a lot of in my apartment, so I bribed a friend with a nicer kitchen to let me hijack it for the day ("You can have all the food you want!").

Somehow, a saucepan and a blender will turn this mess into really spicy hot sauce.

(Credit: Scott Kidder)

Plus, if you're not near a massive gourmet supermarket like Whole Foods, you might have some issues: While most of the ingredients in Food 2.0 are pretty standard, the Latin and Asian overtones of many of the recipes mean that there may be a handful of weird items on your shopping list. Then there's the eco factor. Ayers extols the virtues of buying organic and buying local--the foodie's version of Google's "don't be evil" mantra--but the recipe for "Google Hot Sauce," which I absolutely had to try, involved a few ingredients that I'm pretty sure they don't grow in the States. I'm not sure how to calculate the carbon footprint of tamarind paste from India and pomegranate molasses from Lebanon, but I'm pretty sure Al Gore would frown upon it.

And finally, if you never got over your childhood fear of vegetables, do not buy this book.

Now for the good stuff. The concoctions in Food 2.0 frankly rock. I enlisted a few hungry friends to test out five recipes: the signature hot sauce, two varieties of smoothie, a Vietnamese chicken-and-shrimp dish, and some spring rolls. The recipes, for the most part, are no-brainers as long as you have a few basic kitchen skills; they took me significantly longer to prepare than the book said they would, but nothing blew up, and no one was poisoned.

And the stuff's good: healthy and light but fulfilling, flavorful, and totally quirky. A few eyebrows were raised when I started dumping sliced cucumber, mint leaves, apple cider, and lemon sorbet into a blender for the Jade Smoothie recipe, but the end result was a deliciously summery mix that had one member of the group speculating that it'd make a great afternoon cocktail if you put a shot of rum in it. It was quite the ego trip when my friends, upon tasting the spring rolls, couldn't believe I hadn't turned on a stove in months.

One more thing. That Google hot sauce was really, really spicy. "I have friends from cooking school who make some crazy hot sauces that you have to sign a waiver just to buy," Ayers wrote in a section of Food 2.0 about spicy food. "At Google, hot food--like a lot of other things--became a kind of geeky macho thing. It was their rite of passage, so they just sucked up my hot sauce. It's so hot you wouldn't want to eat it straight."

Regardless, I'm sure that there are plenty of people who would chug the stuff like water if they were told it'd help them on their way to becoming Silicon Valley legends.

NEW YORK--What if you could get that coveted table for two at one of the hottest restaurants in town...by paying $25 for the reservation?

New York's famed Restaurant Week is fast approaching, which means that black books and BlackBerrys are filling with reservations aplenty. But this year, a new start-up called Tablexchange.com might put a fork in the system. The New York-based company has a simple model: it's a marketplace for buying and selling reservations at chic, trendy restaurants. It's brand new, and it's already controversial.

"So let's have a show of hands. Who thinks this is genius, and who thinks this is evil?" Such was the question posed by Scott Heiferman, Meetup.com founder and host of the New York Tech Meetup, when Tablexchange co-founders Gabriel Erbst and Dwight Lee presented their site at the January edition of the event earlier this month. Tablexchange is still small; with only a thousand registered users so far, it doesn't exactly have eBay-caliber activity levels, but it's starting to quietly take off. A table for two on Friday night at Little Owl, a tiny West Village restaurant where reservations seem to sell out in minutes, is on the books for $20, and seats at the chic Italian restaurant Babbo are going for $40.

Gabriel Erbst described the site as a solution for busy New Yorkers trying to mitigate the tension between the city's competitive, see-and-be-seen social climate and hectic professional lives that make it unfeasible to reserve a table at a red-hot restaurant three weeks in advance. "I worked at an investment bank for two years as an analyst," Erbst said in an interview with CNET News.com several days later. "My friends and colleagues were constantly busy, constantly working all the time." He and some friends started Tablexchange, which also offers reservation auctions in San Francisco and the Hamptons, Long Island's upper-crust summer escape, for people who don't know when they're going to be free, or who may need to pull out of reservations with little notice.

For busy New Yorkers eager to savor the city's culinary culture, the concept makes sense on the surface. But at the New York Tech Meetup, there was no real consensus on Heiferman's "genius or evil" question. About half the audience, seeing Tablexchange as a smart new way to democratize the cutthroat business of fine dining, raised their hands in accordance with the "genius" option. The other half, billing it as just plain sleazy, opted for "evil."

Some prominent figures in the New York hospitality industry don't see much gray area. "I just find it distasteful and manipulative," said Richard Coraine, chief of operations for the Union Square Hospitality Group, which operates several dining hot-spots like Gramercy Tavern, Union Square Cafe, and Tabla.

"We want to know you. We want you to talk to our reservation people. We want you to know our staff," Coraine continued. "That's really what gets to me, is that we have no relation-building opportunity in (reservation reselling sites). There's an added price we can't control, and that skews the value to us. It's very parasitic in its nature, which I don't find to be in keeping with the hospitality business."

"Scalping," the practice of reselling tickets to hot sporting and music events, often at a shocking premium, has been going on for years and has only escalated with the conveniences offered by the Web. It's controversial, and in some areas there are laws and regulations against it: Several sports teams, like the Boston Red Sox and New England Patriots, have banned season-ticket holders from reselling above face value. And a brief legal flurry erupted last fall when prices for kids' music sensation Hannah Montana soared above the $200 mark on ticket reselling Web sites like the eBay-owned StubHub, and consumer protection advocates weren't too happy.

"I think, realistically, reservations at some restaurants in New York are very scarce, and it's not surprising that some capitalist folks have found a way to take advantage of that," said Ben Leventhal of the popular local restaurant blog Eater. "I don't really see it being that different from scalping seats to the Yankees or the Knicks, frankly."

But it is different, because restaurant reservations typically do not come with a price tag--and putting a monetary value on it can just look tacky. "I'm already down a hundred when you walk in the front door, and that's not something that I find palatable," Coraine said in reference to the fact that a site like Tablexchange means that people are spending money on a restaurant that the restaurant never sees. "I want to control the entire value equation."

Tablexchange doesn't mark the first time that restaurateurs have felt threatened, or even just repulsed, by a reservation-selling site: Last year, an online "concierge" service called PrimeTimeTables gained some negative buzz around New York restaurant blogs for daring to charge an exorbitant subscription fee for "guaranteed" reservations. But Erbst says Tablexchange is different. "What we are, we operate like a peer exchange," he said when asked about PrimeTimeTables. "We match up buyers and sellers, whereas they are just the sellers themselves."

Erbst added that Tablexchange, which makes money by taking a commission from each sale as well as through advertising revenue, doesn't operate in an auction format, so you won't see people bidding into the triple figures. Additionally, buyers and sellers are restricted to reservations on coveted Friday and Saturday nights (as well as weekdays during Restaurant Week). This may help Tablexchange save face by looking less sleazy, but it also could mean that another, more brazen site could come along and fill that niche.

All in all, there's a good chance that this sort of commodity could take off in New York--but don't look for it to become an epidemic on the scale of Hannah Montana tickets. "I think it's going to grow and get uglier in New York for sure. I don't see there being much opportunity in very many other cities," Eater's Leventhal said, adding that there just aren't many U.S. municipalities with such a high-demand restaurant industry. "But again, for me, I think it really comes back to scarcity. If the tables are not available, and people are willing to spend money on them, then chances are you're going to be willing to find someone willing to sell them."

And in the unlikely event that Tablexchange and potential rivals do manage to cause real headaches for the restaurant industry, there are some undesirable but nevertheless possible steps that could be taken: photo identification, or credit card verification, for example. And at the very least, a meticulous restaurant staff could keep tabs on potential opportunists: for example, if "Bill Gates" makes a reservation every Friday night but a different couple shows up each time.

"I think, to varying degrees, they already are paying closer attention to the names in the book and how the reservations are being secured," Leventhal said. "In a very basic way, the restaurateurs are not happy losing control of their reservations so they're going to do whatever they can to get it back."