Making a reservation, Shanghai style

Da Dong restaurant

This evening the family is having a New Year´s dinner. Chinese new year is a month down the road, but since Chinese do not mind to piggy-back on others´celebrations, most restaurants this evening are booked out, when we inquired by phone. It does not stop the Shanghainese.
On our way to have a lunch, we walked into five restaurants to inquire about making a reservation for today´s New Year´s eve dinner. Five times we got our names down. Although I felt mildly guilty at the first few reservations, it seems to be the way to go forward, and restaurants do include the fair chance of a ´no-show´after a reservation.
We got five times order to be present ten minutes before the arranged tie otherwise our reservation would loose its value. Even though we had to leave a mobile number, the chances looked pretty slim they would actually call us, only if there would be nobody to take our reservation.
Best chances makes actually the Da Dong Duck restaurant, a Beijing chain that only recently opened up in Shanghai. But there are still four other option open, or we could go to any restaurant where they will have many ´no-shows´too.
Does such a system makes sense? We will see that tonight.

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