Auctioning off a dinner reservation is the future of dining?

In the future, restaurant dining rooms might never be full. However, if you want to get a seat, you may have to talk to your friendly neighborhood reservation scalper.

Next has created a wild auctioning frenzy in Chicago, as diners scramble to get seats in the new restaurant from Alinea’s Grant Achatz and Nick Kokonas. The restaurant’s reservations and sales are all online; diners purchase all-inclusive tickets (fixed-price dinner, taxes and tip) for a set night and then show up and are shown to their table, as they would at the theater or the ballpark.