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Back in its pop-up days, Lazy Bear was one of the hottest tickets in town, and while it's opening a brick-and-mortar with two nightly seatings (each accommodating 40 diners), fans' ardor shows no sign of abating. Chef-owner David Barzelay launched tickets for Lazy Bear's brick-and-mortar space on Friday, and eager fans almost immediately crashed the purchase site, which uses the ticketing system created by Alinea and Next restaurateur Nick Kokonas. "The huge amount of traffic for our very first ticket sale initially crashed Alinea and Next's six servers," Barzelay said in an e-mail to Lazy Bear fans. "When they added another ten, those crashed. When the servers finally came back up, the credit card processor crashed. So we managed to sell exactly 2 tickets before deciding to pause the ticketing and re-group with more servers for a re-launch."
That re-launch went down yesterday, and tickets for the first two weeks of dinners sold out almost immediately, particularly impressive given the $120/head pricing (beverage pairings are an additional $50). By comparison, two-Michelin-starred Coi, where dinner tickets through Kokonas' site are only $25 more at non-peak times, still has plenty of slots available for the same period. Even Barzelay was taken aback by the demand. "HUGE apologies to all of you took your valuable time Friday afternoon to reserve tickets only to have that process be for nothing," he wrote. "We did extensive testing over the weekend, and have ramped up capacity significantly."
We are much better at cooking and taking care of guests than we are at selling them tickets.
— Lazy Bear (@lazybearsf) September 22, 2014
We'll have more on Lazy Bear's new permanent home, including interior photos and menu intel, when it debuts on Friday. In the meantime, those who weren't able to score tickets should keep an eye on Twitter:
Pssssst. We have held out a few tickets that we'll occasionally release and tweet about.
— Lazy Bear (@lazybearsf) September 22, 2014
