Ever been on a business trip and needed a clean, well-lighted place to get some work done? Ever glanced longingly into an empty restaurant, shuttered until dinnertime, and thought that its quiet ambiance looked infinitely preferable to the dull roar of the Starbucks around the corner?

New Yorker Preston Pesek certainly has, most notably in Tokyo at 3am in the morning, when he wished he could go into a restaurant there and use its Wi-Fi. That’s when he had the idea for Spacious, a startup that is turning some of New York’s best and hippest restaurants into co-working spaces during the day.

Co-founded with software engineer Chris Smothers, Spacious already operates at L’Apicio and Daniel Boulud’s DBGB Kitchen & Bar, both in the East Village, and has plans to expand to about a dozen new restaurants in New York in the near future. New locations in San Francisco and Los Angeles are also on the table. A monthly membership costs US$95 (A$127), less than half the monthly rent for most other co-working office spaces.

In an interview with Fast Company magazine, Pesek said the trick had been to work out how to work with restaurants in a way that actually enhanced their evening business.

An hour before dinner service begins, when the hot desks have to begin their transition back to dining tables, users get a text message advising them that it’s last call for coffee. They can then choose to stay at their table for dinner, head over to the bar for happy hour, or make like a tree.

“We thought maybe we’d have to kick everyone out at dinnertime,” Pesek told the magazine. “But it’s actually not the case. It’s great for the restaurant, too, because when you open at 5pm, you’re not packed, typically. It’s nice to have a little activity and energy in the room. When somebody walks by on the street and they say, ‘Oh, this restaurant’s open but nobody’s in there,’ that’s not a good thing.”

Spacious has plans to expand beyond restaurants as the business grows. “Cities are actually not scarce for space,” Pesek said. “You just have to figure out how to activate the vacancy windows that exist in spaces and buildings throughout the city and figure out how to connect those spaces with the people who can use them right now.”

“The most sustainable urban development is making better use of what we have, as opposed to building anything new,” he said. “It’s about not having to build more capacity, but realising that the capacity is already there.”

Whether or not the model could work in Australia is open to question. Many of our best restaurants are open for lunch as well as dinner – and some for breakfast as well.

Those that aren’t – such as Attica in Melbourne or Quay in Sydney – might not be able to pull it off, either.

“It isn’t something that would work at Attica as we use the space the whole day for set up, despite not having guests until 6pm,” said Ben Shewry, who became sole owner of Attica last year. The restaurant was the only Australian restaurant to make the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list – for the third consecutive year – last month.

“It could be a bit tricky managing it from a staff prospective, because we would need to employ one person to keep an eye on the dining room, and that would probably be cost-prohibitive.”