The two of us have been working together for over four years. We sit face to face at opposite desks in the office. But for one Thursday night in September, we were total strangers.
At least that’s what we wanted the host and wait staff at Semma to think. No eye contact, smirks or hellos passed between us as we slipped past each other in the small and bustling South Indian restaurant in Greenwich Village.
As designers and graphics editors on the Digital News Design team at The New York Times, we can often be found behind computer screens, working with data to design the home page display for election results, for example, or writing code for multimedia articles.
Eating some of the best dosas in New York City is usually an extracurricular pursuit. So what were we doing reporting at Semma? And why were we ignoring each other?
First, some background: In June, Priya Krishna, a reporter for the Food section, noticed that while many journalists had written about the competitive nature of dining out in the city, it was hard to determine why reservations were so tough to snag. How do popular restaurants manage the reservation process? How do they handle their V.I.P. guests? And how can the average diner win the reservation game?
To answer those questions, which we did last week in an interactive article, we needed to work with a restaurant that was willing to show us every step of the reservation process. So Priya reached out to Semma, one of the hardest-to-get-into places in the city. They said yes; they wanted to show people just how complex the process was from their side, too.
That’s where we came in. When people think of data journalism, they may not think of food reporting. But for readers to really understand why getting a reservation is so hard, data was critical.
Reservations for Semma open at midnight, 30 days in advance of the preferred date — ours was Sept. 14. Every day, starting Aug. 16, Santo Pesantez, who manages Semma’s operations, shared with us data he had from Resy, the reservation service the restaurant uses. This included every booking, cancellation and how many people were on the waiting list for Sept. 14. Getting the daily data allowed us to see how quickly tables filled up, what time slots were most popular and what happened when people canceled. Having that information helped us determine our booking strategies.
In addition to interpreting data, part of our job as graphics editors is to present complicated information in creative and, importantly, clear ways. We knew from the outset that the article was likely to need an unconventional structure to present the reservation data (we did it with diagrams of the tables, which lit up as they filled) and interviews both with people who scored reservations early and those who snapped them up at the last minute. To weave all of that together, we worked closely with Priya and our editor, Patrick Farrell.
As we learned more, we kept thinking that trying to get a reservation was like playing a game, and we wanted to bring that idea into the article’s design. We commissioned the illustrator Nick Little to incorporate a type of pixel art — retro 8-bit — to evoke old-school gaming imagery; we also built mini-games throughout the article, challenging the reader to book a reservation as soon as one opened up. (Apologies, but we intentionally designed the games so you couldn’t win; we wanted to conjure the frustration of not getting a table.)
But all of this still doesn’t explain why we were acting like strangers that night at Semma.
When Sept. 14 finally arrived, we had spent a month gathering data. We wanted to visit the restaurant, with Priya, to speak with those lucky enough to have procured a table. We also wanted to understand how the restaurant was physically set up, to bring that sense of space into our article design.
And we wanted to find out what it was like to walk in without a reservation. One of us, Umi, had been working with Semma, while the other, Aliza, had not been in direct contact with the staff. So Aliza would be the one to try walking in. To ensure that she got the real experience, we needed to make sure the restaurant didn’t see us interacting.
Though we assumed Aliza would be asked to wait, or worse, turned away, a spot at the bar was, amazingly, available. So while one of us was hunched in a tight space behind the host stand, taking notes along with Priya, the other enjoyed reporting on the dosa. And the lobster. And the mung bean salad.
The next day at the office, we had a lot to talk about, face to face.