Against all odds, I have booked a table at Noma! This is probably the most coveted restaurant seat in the world right now, and I managed to get one (well, six). If you need any proof of that, just google “Noma booking” and look at the sheer number of articles written about it! The booking’s been made for 6 people at 8pm on Wednesday the 20th of July. It still hasn’t quite sunk in yet for me… I can’t believe I’m actually going! The trip just got a whole lot more real..
So, how did I do it?
The booking opens at CEST 10am sharp, which is 4pm here in Singapore. This meant I was in the PC lounge here at NUS (National University of Singapore) at 3:30pm with a desktop computer and my laptop. The booking system assigns each browser a unique ID, so you can have separate queue positions for different browsers. This meant I had Chrome and Internet Explorer on my laptop, and on the desktop Chrome, Firefox, and IE – oh, I also had my phone, so six booking enquiries at once to improve my chances. Here’s what my setup looked like:
Even 5 minutes before the seat release, the booking page was down due to too much traffic – 10,000+ people flooding on to a site designed to regulate a couple of thousand, maximum. The 4pm release came and went, the booking page was still down – at least, I told myself, no one else can access the page and book. If it’s down for me, it’s down for everyone. I kept on tabbing between browsers, constantly refreshing my five browsers.
After about an hour and a quarter of frantically hitting F5 (refresh) and the website still being down, suddenly one of my browsers threw up a queueing page! I was at 106 in the queue, and by the time I had refreshed my other browsers (just a few seconds later) they were at 300, 600, and 800 in the queue. So speed definitely counts.
I watched the queues tick down for about 45 more minutes, waiting nervously, hesitant to let myself believe I had done it. Finally, I was taken to the booking calendar and saw this:
A few minutes later I received the confirmation email – in just under two hours, I had done it: I had booked a table at Noma. I couldn’t believe it, all that planning and imagining… I just walked around with a stupid grin on for the rest of the day. I hope this account helps someone else in their attempt, if it does, please let me know!
Next post: picking the right backpack
– Alex
P.S. Apologies for the pictures of the screen – there wasn’t time to screenshot and crop!
