If someone is willing to pay for a reservation and a restaurant willing to take payment, then it’s a free market. It’s not inefficient at all.
You may not like it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not free
To be perfectly clear, bots don't eat food, and we don't need a market to tell us otherwise. Even an individual having Google Duplex reserve ten tables in advance isn't going to be able to eat ten dinners. But if reservations actually cost money, then any restaurant doing the smart thing of just skipping no-shows to keep the kitchen running is now defrauding reservation holders. Capacity has to be reserved and left fallow for the sake of optionality.
Bringing this back to market terms: if reservations are so in demand that restaurants have to charge for them, why don't they just raise the prices on the actual food instead?
If it's not useful to society, society has no moral reason to tolerate it. If it indeed benefits a few individuals massively while on net reducing utility to society, an argument can be made that society has a moral imperative to ban it. Hence the limitations on gambling, on alcohol and tobacco marketing/sales, etc.
Of course not.
> If it's not useful to society, society has no moral reason to tolerate it
Then it’s not a free market.
And now, you want to actually go to Restaurant A and eat a curry, but they look at you like you've grown an extra head. Eat Food? What, here? In Restaurant A?
Congratulations, you've just invented banking, where people look at you similarly if you attempt to actually go and collect the gold that your bank says represents the money that's actually stored as a series of north and south magnetic domains on a thin sheet of rust painted onto a rapidly-spinning aluminium disk.
Meanwhile I ring the guy at the restaurant started by his grandmother when she fled Pakistan at the end of the Second World War, about ten minutes before we show up, and when I get there I've got a pint of Guinness, a menu, and some chapatis and chutney already on the table.
I prefer it that way. The food's better, for a start.
I don't need the menu, the guy's just going to bring me the desi shit from the family meal.