Hip Brooklyn eateries don’t do reservations

No reservations? At Brooklyn’s buzziest restaurants, there’s no alternative — but be prepared to wait.

And wait.

Hip borough restaurants refuse to pencil anyone in, leaving lines of hungry diners snaking across the county of Kings.

It’s a Brooklyn thing, foodies say.

That doesn’t mean diners are happy about it — especially those who journey from Manhattan to get a taste of those trendy places critics rave about.

At Roberta’s, an of-the-moment Bushwick pizza joint off the Morgan Ave. stop of the L train, the dinnertime wait on the weekends averages two hours.

“This meal had better change my life,” griped Matt Devereaux, 28, of Murray Hill, who only schlepped to Roberta’s due to “peer pressure” and found the two-hour wait on a recent Saturday night “obnoxious.” “If this doesn’t change my life, if this isn’t something I can’t get in the borough of Manhattan, this is wholly irrelevant.”

Diners are out of luck getting reservations at borough hotspots like Pok Pok NY, Diner, Frankies 457, al di la and Battersby — unless they’re traveling in packs (write-ins are sometimes okayed for big parties).

It’s mostly the borough’s casual-but-stylish newcomers that don’t take reservations — Brooklyn’s more formal old-school stalwarts like Peter Luger Steakhouse or the River Cafe are happy to pencil in diners. But those chic upstarts are exactly where everyone wants to go.

Over in Park Slope, Alyssa Venere and her boyfriend were in the middle of a two-hour wait for Asian-fusion restaurant Talde. “It drives me freaking nuts!” she said of the no-rezzie policy. The couple had gone to the Columbia Street Thai spot Pok Pok NY the weekend before and found the long line equally frustrating: “It’s good, but not good enough to wait two hours,” she said.

Other couples stuck in line for Talde took the drastic steps of finding activities to kill time elsewhere — or even pre-eating offsite while waiting for their table. “We left our name, we think we’re going to try and wait it out, drink somewhere else, maybe get an appetizer,” said Cari Frisch of Brooklyn Heights.

Eric Gordon, 43, of Bed-Stuy, only stopped at Talde briefly to put in his name for a table, planning to return much later for his meal. “They said there was a two hour wait, so we’re going to watch a concert in Prospect Park and then come back,” he said.

Does this sound like too much contorting to get a table… in one of the boroughs? Why don’t hotspots, already packed to the gills, simply start taking reservations?

Talde chef Dale Talde insists his no-reservation policy helps the restaurant remain a local joint. “We decided not to take reservations because it was really important to us to make the restaurant a true neighborhood spot, a place where the locals could always pop in and grab a bite to eat,” he wrote via email. “It’s been successful so far.”

Vanessa Rimando, Roberta’s general manager, says they do not take reservations because they don’t want to discourage walk-in customers. “The truth is, taking reservations inflates the wait time” by leaving empty seats, she added.

Doug Crowell, owner of American comfort-food bistro Buttermilk Channel in Carroll Gardens — where a weekend wait for dinner can easily go over an hour — says a reservation system could similarly “freeze up” his small, 70-seat room.

“I feel very fortunate that people will wait for a table,” Crowell says. “If all the people who came in at 8 p.m. had to eat at 8 p.m. and just left and went somewhere else, that would really be bad for us. We really depend on some people waiting.”

And so do nearby businesses. Lingering diners create neighborhood sub-economies, resulting in higher traffic at nearby bars where people pop in for a drink while they wait for a call from the maitre d’.

At Buttermilk Channel, Crowell steers waiting patrons to his restaurant’s tiny bar. When that fills up, he points them toward the nearby Minibar and Abilene, which also benefit from the spillover of the walk-in-only Frankies 457. Says a bartender: “They’ll be halfway through their drink and the restaurant will call them about their table, and they’ll rush out.”

Pok Pok NY pushes a list of four nearby bars on antsy diners stuck in line - which is good, because waits have reportedly peaked at four hours. Soon, Pok Pok NY will find a way to profit from its line: The eatery is building its own bar less than a block away, to be open by the end of summer. Called Whiskey Soda, its primary purpose will be to cater to waiting patrons. Servers will be in contact with hostesses by radio, so they can advise pre-dinner drinkers whether it’s wise to order another drink or appetizer — or if their table is almost ready.

Not everybody is shocked by the waits. Some see it as part of Brooklyn’s emerging food and restaurant scene — a prix fixe part of the experience if you want to dine at prime-time borough eateries.

“It’s a part of the culture, but also, it’s a business model that works for a lot of these restaurants,” says Greg Morabito, editor of food blog Eater New York.

Younger diners are more willing to wait than older diners, according to Morabito. And from a glance around Brooklyn’s buzziest dining rooms, it seems like the sweat equity required to get in the door lures an on-trend clientele that eats up a certain tin-ceilinged, filament lightbulb-lit esthetic.

“The no-reservation system is almost a way of saying, we want customers who are going to come in with an open mind and say, ‘It’s fine if I have to wait because I really want to try this place,’” Morabito says.

Ultimately, however, there will be long waits as long as there are willing participants.

“The restaurateurs know that they can make people wait,” says Morabito.