PX / Soigné

Neither term has a fixed technical definition, so they behave differently in every system that stores them. Resy, OpenTable, SevenRooms, and Tock all give you somewhere to put the mark, as a free-text note, a tag, or a VIP designation, and none of them decides what it means. The house sets the meaning, and a mark everyone interprets differently produces inconsistent service rather than exceptional service.

What is the difference between PX, soigné, and a VIP flag?

A VIP flag is standing and a PX mark is for tonight. The flag describes who a guest is and stays on the record between visits, whether that is a longtime regular, an investor, or a critic. PX describes what should happen at one booking, and it can be applied to a guest with no standing designation at all. A first-timer arriving on a regular’s recommendation is a candidate for PX and not for a permanent flag.

A flagged VIP can also book a Tuesday lunch where nothing special is being asked for, while a guest with an empty profile can be the most carefully handled table in the room. Restaurants that collapse the two end up with a book where a third of the tables carry a mark, and at that point the mark has stopped transmitting anything. Terminology varies by house, so soigné, PX, and various local codes do the same job in different kitchens.

Who should be marked PX?

That is the operator’s call, and it works better written down as a standard than left to whoever has the book open. The categories most houses land on are industry guests and visiting chefs, press and critics, guests of owners and investors, the restaurant’s highest-value regulars, someone whose previous visit went wrong, and a guest celebrating something the restaurant wants to be part of.

The reason matters more than the mark. “PX” alone tells a server to be attentive and gives them nothing to act on, so the useful version carries the specifics: first visit, sent by a named regular, no shellfish, celebrating a promotion. Restraint matters as well, since the designation is worth only as much as its rarity.

How does a PX mark reach the floor in time?

It has to be in front of the team before the doors open, which means the pre-shift list and the host stand rather than a field buried inside a guest profile. Most PX programmes fail at transmission rather than at judgment: the right call gets made in the afternoon and the floor finds out at nine. Operators using a restaurant CRM typically run a VIP and PX report ahead of service for that reason, listing tonight’s marked guests with the reason attached.

The other gap is between venues. A guest handled as PX at one restaurant in a group arrives at a sister restaurant as a stranger, because the designation lived in that venue’s book. Keeping it above the individual book fixes that, and it still has to reach the book to be useful. Loyalist writes designations and notes back into the Resy or OpenTable reservation, so the mark appears where the host is already looking.