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Gramercy Tavern began accepting Valentine's Day reservations 28 days before the holiday. It took all of 11 minutes for all of them to get snagged.

Shelley Clark of Tavern on the Green, a lavish restaurant in Central Park near West 67th Street, shared his view. Like Reinhardt, she did not know about the service until days after Valentine's Day and admitted that there's nothing her restaurant can do to protect itself from what she called a "scam."

James, however, insists that, if anything, his service helps the restaurants because a customer who pays for his reservation will almost certainly honor it.

"The way we see it, each party benefits from this service," he said. "To the customer, we give a table at a great restaurant at the last minute. To the restaurant, we give an assurance against its biggest fear--the no show. On a big night, when they have the most expensive menus out there, it is good for them to know that the seat will be filled, and we are giving them this busy-night assurance."

When the site launched, he predicted that the site's no-show rate would be far below the 15 percent national average." His hypothesis bore out, he said, as not a single person ended up canceling.

"The design of the business is to make no-shows a very rare occurrence," he said. "The people who are buying these reservations really need them."

The site, which James says pretty much runs itself, ended up selling off about half of their reservations. The rest were cancelled in advance. Although a week after the holiday they still haven't tallied up their profits, he expected that, after the cost of creating and incorporating the site, they came out about even.

While booking a table at New York's finest establishments on Friday and Saturday nights is often next to impossible, James is not interested in extending his service to regular weekends. Instead, the website will continue to operate only on major dining-out days such as Mother's Day, New Years, Easter and, possibly, Thanksgiving.

He is, however, considering spreading out to three new markets, Chicago, Boston and Miami, as well as several smaller markets for which he says the service's fees would have to be adjusted. He is also planning to reserve tables around major events such as the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.

"By doing this just on special occasions," James said, "we guarantee that there will be the most need. We want to be the only option."

"It's not about convenience," he added. "It's about desperation."

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