Why you suddenly need to look on OpenTable for reservations to the city’s hottest restaurants

When looking for a hot-ticket reservation online in recent years, your first stop has probably been Resy, the American Express-owned platform that hosts tough-to-book tables for the likes of My Loup, Royal Sushi, and Illata. Next, you might have consulted Tock (now also in the AmEx family), which handles a range of equally exclusive spots, including Mawn, Andiario, and Provenance.

Likely your last stop was OpenTable, the 26-year-old website that helped pioneer the online-reservation field. OpenTable’s sprawling Philadelphia catalog features plenty of well-regarded restaurants — most notably, the vast majority of Stephen Starr’s empire — alongside a number of chains. Think McCormick & Schmick’s, Ocean Prime, Sullivan’s Steakhouse, and Red Lobster.

That sort of company gave chef-owner Ian Graye pause when initially selecting a reservation platform for Pietramala, the vegan Northern Liberties BYOB that has won national accolades (and made it into Craig LaBan’s Top 10 restaurants of 2024) for its inventive approach to produce. OpenTable “seemed like not really the platform for nice restaurants to be on,” he said. “It seemed like more of the general run-of-the-mill places.”

When Graye surveyed the reservation landscape, he judged that most of Pietramala’s peers were on Resy, while high-end spots without too much need for marketing were on Tock — which Graye ultimately went with when he opened Pietramala in 2022.

Recently, however, Graye switched platforms, putting Pietramala on OpenTable. He’s not the only one. In recent months, Tabachoy, Honeysuckle, Roxanne, River Twice, Fiorella, and Vetri have all joined OpenTable. The migration is happening in other cities, too.

OpenTable’s aggressive capture of hip restaurants marks a new front in a yearslong scrum for reservation-making supremacy. By numbers alone, OpenTable is and always has been the clear winner, representing more than 60,000 restaurants worldwide, seating 1.7 billion diners a year. But over the last decade, it has lost its edge as trendy restaurants defected to newer, sleeker platforms like Resy and Tock. (Resy has 20,000 restaurants on its platform, while Tock has more than 7,000.)

Now under millennial leadership, OpenTable is luring buzzy restaurants across the country back to its site with enhanced features, deep discounts, and a newly launched credit card perks program backed by Visa. At first blush, you might think this a case of an old-timer attempting to revamp its image, making OpenTable cool again. In reality, OpenTable is playing catch-up in a dining-industry arms race where restaurants are commodities and luxury credit card holders enjoy the spoils of war.

When it first came on the scene in 1998, OpenTable’s main competition was the phone and a physical reservation book. For diners, the website was convenient: They could search a database of restaurants for available seatings by cuisine and location, book a table, and receive an email confirmation moments later — all without interfacing with a host or a message machine.

For restaurateurs, at first, OpenTable alleviated a headache. “I still have hosts who say they have PTSD from our reservation book prior to OpenTable,” Fork owner Ellen Yin said. “We tried to keep track of all our regular customers and who they were and what they did.” Besides managing dining room assignments, the website automated data collection, capturing insights on diners' habits and preferences.

Throughout the aughts, OpenTable vanquished various dot-com competitors and established a near-monopoly over the online reservation-making space. As the years went on, however, its pricing structure vexed restaurant owners. Until recently, the company charged restaurants a flat monthly rate plus a small fee per reservation: $1 if a reservation was made on OpenTable’s site, or 25 cents on the restaurant’s own site.

That left an opening in the reservation-platform market that Resy and Tock both seized on when they debuted in 2014. Both sites were cofounded by industry insiders — Eater cofounder Ben Leventhal and Alinea cofounder Nick Kokonas, respectively — and both took a restaurant-first approach. Tock allowed restaurants to ask customers to prepay or place a deposit on dinner, a tactic that discouraged no-shows and last-minute cancellations. Resy initially put a price on reservations — charging consumers a fee to book in-demand tables — then shared the revenue with restaurants. Both sites ultimately moved away from their initial setups (Resy reservations have been free since 2016), but neither platform ever charged a per-reservation premium the way OpenTable did.

That won them heavy-hitting restaurants. In a matter of years, the two sites became go-to platforms for cool new restaurants, as well as well-regarded established restaurants nationwide. Big names like Le Bernardin and the French Laundry moved over. In Philadelphia, Pizzeria Beddia and Vedge were among dozens of restaurants that signed onto Resy in 2019, while Vernick became the first restaurant in Philly to sign up with Tock the same year.

Two factors have heightened the intensity of the nationwide reservation wars in the last five years. First, American Express bought Resy in 2019, providing the credit card company early and sometimes exclusive access to sought-after restaurant reservations — a desirable perk for its elite AmEx card holders, who pay $325 a year or more in annual fees. The acquisition also gave Resy deep pockets, enabling it to sponsor splashy pop-ups and food events like Amourette and the Chef Conference.

Second, the pandemic made reservations more popular than ever. Between 2021 and 2022, restaurant reservation searches rose more than 100% on Yelp. The allure of hard-to-get seatings has fueled a nightmarish dining culture in New York City, where apps that auction off reservations are flourishing, to the point where people are making tens of thousands of dollars a year from reselling.

“People just don’t wander around looking for food the way they maybe were before the pandemic,” said Oyster House owner Sam Mink, who started offering reservations for the first time ever in the wake of the pandemic. “You want that peace of mind knowing that you’ve reserved that real estate in that restaurant for however long.”

Mink initially signed Oyster House up with Resy, but he switched to OpenTable earlier this year after a sales rep approached him with a convincing pitch: “‘Hey, we’ll feature you as an icon restaurant. We won’t charge you a fee for the first year. We’re going to give you X amount of dollars to sign up, like a sign-on bonus,‘" Mink summarizes, alluding to OpenTable Icons and its Visa Dining Collection — two programs the company launched this summer to compete with its rivals.

OpenTable execs crafted the icons program as a space within a space — to feature the best local restaurants in a city apart from the middling crowd. OpenTable chief operating officer Amy Wei told The Inquirer the program was developed in response to feedback: “What we’ve heard from restaurants is they may not want to be next to Capital Grille [on the OpenTable site] because they are a very special-occasion restaurant,” she said. “We created the Icons program to really highlight the best of the best and have curation.” (To be fair to Wei, I offered Capital Grille up as an example of a generic restaurant.)

Likewise, OpenTable partnered with Visa to offer a “held-tables program,” as Wei describes it. The Visa Dining Collection functions much like Resy and American Express' Global Dining Access program: Card holders in the highest tiers get first and sometimes exclusive dibs on coveted tables. In the case of OpenTable’s Visa Dining Collection, restaurants promise to earmark a set number of reservations for Visa Infinite credit card holders (many of whom pay upwards of $400 in annual fees). Visa, in turn, tenders checks over to restaurants — sweetening OpenTable’s sales pitch.

With this newfound fiscal flexibility, OpenTable is better positioned to compete with Resy and Tock. That includes wooing the best restaurants by providing their service free of charge.

That’s how OpenTable won over Ian Graye at Pietramala. “They basically gave it to us for free and wrote us a check as well,” Graye said, specifying that the check came from Visa. (OpenTable’s CEO, Debby Soo, has maintained in interviews that OpenTable does not pay restaurants.) Graye declined to say how much the check was for, but he said it was substantial.

“It seems like they’re just doing whatever it takes to dominate the landscape,” Graye said. “They need to get as many people to do that by any means necessary, and that’s what they’re willing to do.”

Wei chalks this sort of maneuvering to the price of keeping up. “Sometimes we have to meet the competition where they’re at and ... gift our product,” she said. “If that’s the deal that they have [elsewhere], for them to move over, we need to match the deal.” She added that OpenTable has shaken up its pricing model as well, creating various options, including flat monthly fees that don’t involve any per-reservation charges.

Even as OpenTable makes moves to regain ground, Wei insists the platform is more focused on proving its utility than overhauling its public image. In the last year, Wei said, OpenTable has added more than 50 new features, including ticketed experiences and a curated wait-list feature.

“What we really need to do is ... take care of the nitty-gritty,” Wei said. “Our job is to help restaurants thrive, and we do everything that we can to make that happen. It’s the restaurant’s job to be really cool. They’re the product.”

If OpenTable, Resy, and Tock — the biggest names in the game — build equally desirable catalogs of restaurants, they’ll need to set themselves apart from each other in different ways. It may come down to usefulness.

That’s ultimately why Ogawa co-owner Vy To chose OpenTable over Resy when putting Almanac, her new Japanese cocktail lounge, on a reservation platform. She cited frustrations with Resy’s system, which she uses for Ogawa. “People would book, people cancel, and we couldn’t charge. When the guests text us on the [Resy] app, we don’t have any notifications,” To said. “When OpenTable came to us and showed us these new features, [her co-owner and husband] Victor and I were like, ‘Oh ... these are the things that we have been annoyed with with Resy.‘”

Other restaurant owners identified different shortcomings that could potentially be redressed. “I didn’t feel like Resy was really helping me grow my business with marketing,” Mink said. “OpenTable, they said they could help us more. So we’ll see.”

On the other hand, OpenTable will have to prove it’ll be a better partner than its competitors after the freebies run out.

The transition from Tock to OpenTable has been bumpy for Graye. There were double-booked tables early on, leading to Pietramala having to cancel customer’s reservations and comp food. He also encountered difficulties setting up the restaurant’s profile on the site, even after being doggedly pursued by an OpenTable sales rep.

Before signing on, “OpenTable was calling me every week, emailing. The person was showing up at the restaurant. The person was waiting outside the restaurant when I got there. The person was not letting it go. It was intense,” Graye said.

Since making the switch, he’s had trouble getting hold of customer service to take care of his issues with the software.

Graye hasn’t seen any marketing of his restaurant so far. It took three months to receive the check Visa promised. As of Dec. 27, Pietramala is still not listed in Philadelphia’s Visa Dining Collection, which at the moment includes some well-established Philly restaurants (Vetri, Fork) and buzzy newcomers (Bastia, Little Water, Scampi) alongside a couple eyebrow-raising choices, like the Philadelphia branch of the chain Steak 48 (a dining experience Craig LaBan described as “excruciating”).

That’s a liability for Pietramala. “Those tables are locked for the Visa Dining Collection until 48 hours before, so we lose potential reservations,” Graye said. The experience has left him with a sour taste in his mouth. “I’m entirely disappointed in them.”