Last Saturday night my husband I accomplished what few have ever accomplished: We got a table in a little over a half-hour at Bad Saint, the craved-after Washington, D.C., restaurant which doesn’t take reservations and where the scenesters start lining up for dinner out on the sidewalk as early as 2 p.m. on weekends.
In August 2016 Bon Appetit magazine rated Bad Saint, whose specialty is upscale Filipino food, the number-two new restaurant in America. Restaurant critics for the New York Times and the Washington Post had earlier showered it with stars and rave reviews. Since the place has only 24 seats, mostly stools along counters, in its tiny gentrified-storefront location, and since Washington, like most cities, crawls with status-driven foodies, your wait in line (or the wait in line by the underemployed millennial you have hired as a ringer) is typically at least two hours on weeknights and much, much longer on Saturday. When Bad Saint’s doors finally open, at 5:30 p.m., the first 25 people get right in, and the names of the rest go onto a wait list; the restaurant will text them when a seat frees up. People whose names don’t get onto that list by 6:15 are unlikely to get seated at all that night; Bad Saint’s last seating is at 11 p.m.
