MAÎTRE D'

About the Role

MAÎTRE D' — NORTE NYC

Mission: Transform the reservation book into a strategic tool to position NORTE among New York's most sought-after and hardest-to-reserve restaurants. This role is not a host but the owner of the book, creator of regulars, and the General Manager's right-hand person.

Responsibilities

• Owner of the Book: Decide which tables to protect and release, manage time slots, maximize each shift, handle cancellations, waitlist, walk-ins, last-minute requests, and relationships with regulars, VIPs, concierges, and friends of the house. Goal: Fill the restaurant correctly, not just fill it. Create scarcity and desirability.
• Create Regulars: Actively identify and develop potential regular clients. Know their names, preferred seating, food and drink preferences, companions, celebrations, visit frequency, and how to surprise them next. Use Loyalist as the central tool for building and maintaining client profiles.
• Strategic Seating: Understand the social architecture of the dining room and mix regulars, new clients, VIPs, industry professionals, corporates, celebrations, and walk-ins nightly. Ensure hospitality is front-facing while strategy remains behind the scenes.
• General Manager's Right Hand: Act as the GM's trusted person with authority to make decisions during service. Collaborate on reservations, pacing, VIPs, regulars, guest recovery, customer experience, and strategic relationships. Be the GM's eyes and ears in the dining room.

Requirements

• Currently working in a successful, high-demand restaurant in NY with direct responsibility for the reservation book, table inventory, VIPs/regulars, waitlist, pacing/turn times, and availability decisions during service.
• Proven, current experience in a similar role (Maître d', Head Maître d', or Reservations Manager) in high-demand NY restaurants.
• Proficiency in Resy/OpenTable, inventory management, waitlists/Notify, table management, turn times, VIP management, and guest recognition.
• Experience with hospitality CRMs like Loyalist for guest profiles, visit history, and personalization is highly valued.
• Ideally, existing relationships within the NYC hospitality community.

Qualifications

• Exceptional memory for people, social intelligence, presence, discretion, warmth, confidence, extreme organization, quick decision-making, business acumen, and real relationships in NY.
• Elegant without being pretentious; understands that hospitality and business are not opposites.

Success Metrics

• Occupancy/covers, waitlist and Notify growth, repeat guest percentage and frequency, regulars base growth, inventory recovery from no-shows/cancellations, revenue optimization, guest recognition level, and dining room quality/energy.

About the Company

NORTE is a restaurant aiming to be among the most sought-after and hardest to reserve in New York. The goal is to make it difficult to enter, impossible to forget, and easy to want to return.