By Gennady Sheyner

Last year, Doug James decided that he could make a lot of money off people like himself. It was the day before Valentine's Day and he still hadn't reserved a table.

James, who works at an advertising agency in Los Angeles, spent several hours frantically calling restaurants in the area before he finally found one that still had a table available at a reasonable hour.

At dinner, the 35-year-old confided to his girlfriend, Jennifer Young, how difficult it was for him to get the reservation and mentioned that they could probably make a business catering to desperate procrastinators looking for a last-minute opening.

"If someone was really on the ball, he can make a lot of money," he told his sweetheart over dinner.

Young, whom James describes as "really on the ball," agreed and by the time they finished eating, they had created what he calls a "futures market for restaurant reservations."

The concept behind James and Young's site, Withoutreservations.biz, was simple. They would identify the most romantic and upscale restaurants in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco and book a table at each of them for Valentine's Day. Then, a little over a week before Feb. 14, they would sell the reservations for $40 each to customers through their Web site.

James and Young, 30, began reserving tables during the first week of January. James has spent substantial time in all three cities and was fairly familiar with the dining scene in each. They scanned countless restaurant reviews and top-10 lists and came up with a list of about 70 romantic retreats in the three cities that would be sure to fill up for restaurateurs' favorite holiday. About 40 of them were in Los Angeles, the rest were split between the other two cities. They reserved a table at each of these restaurants under a generic-sounding pseudonym, providing a credit card number when necessary.

Their site launched on Feb. 4. And the day before it went live, James put out a press release describing his service as a "charity for the discriminating procrastinator."

Managers at some of New York's top restaurants, however, describe it as a scam and compare it to scalping tickets at sporting events. Because the reservation isn't worth any money, however, the service does not qualify as scalping by either California or New York laws, according to a story in the Wall Street Journal.

"It is definitely something we don't endorse," said Scott Reinhardt, who handles reservations for Gramercy Tavern, an upscale restaurant on 20 th Street and Park Avenue. "It's hard enough for people to get reservations here, even without a service like this taking up a table. But, the reality is, there is really nothing we can do about it. It looks like they got the reservation at the same time everyone else did."

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Photos by Gennady Sheyner

Produced by
Gennady Sheyner,
Fahmida Rashid