Are you a red wine drinker? A high spender? Or perhaps you’re a slow eater, the sort who takes up a restaurant’s table for longer than they’d like. You might not even know — but OpenTable does.
Those are just a few of the notes that the reservation platform has started serving up to some restaurant staff when you make a booking, all based on the orders you’ve made and money you’ve spent at other restaurants in the past.
Kat Menter, a host at a Michelin-starred restaurant who posts about food online as Eating Out Austin, first spotted the new “AI-assisted” tags at work a few weeks ago and shared a look at the system on TikTok. Most flag that a customer frequently orders specific drinks, like red wine or cocktails, but others note customers who spend more than average, frequently leave reviews (“Be nice to them,” Menter jokes), or have a tendency to cancel tables at the last minute. “Mine just says ‘juice,’” she admits. “I love to brunch, that is true.”
The trademark AI “sparkle” accompanies each tag. Screenshot: Eating Out Austin
If you’re anything like me, all this might have come as a surprise. I just use OpenTable to make reservations, after all — so how does it know what I’ve ordered?
The truth is, OpenTable — like Resy and other rivals — has always done more than just help you find a table. The platform is billed to restaurants as a one-stop shop to handle reservations, waitlists, reviews, marketing, and more, but it also offers its own table management software, along with integrations into the most popular point of sale (POS) systems in the industry, such as Toast or Epos. These are the tools that run much of the day-to-day in restaurants themselves, including inventory, orders, and payments.
That’s how OpenTable knows that you usually order a couple glasses of white wine with dinner. You don’t even have to make the booking through OpenTable — so long as you have an OpenTable account, and give the restaurant your phone number or email, your booking might be paired to your profile regardless. OpenTable will then know when you arrived, what you ordered, how much you spent, what time you paid, and more besides. The data finds a way.
Still, the company might also know less about you than you think. I used its privacy rights request form to pull a copy of all the data it has on me, and it was reassuringly dull: some basic contact details, a list of the reservations I’d made through the platform, and some limited credit card information. One reservation, from 2012, had the note that I was a “first time diner,” and that’s about it.
Now restaurants will know to be nice to online reviewers. Screenshot: Eating Out Austin
But let’s say OpenTable knows more about you than it does me. What would a restaurant want with that information? It’s essentially a shorter, simpler version of the sort of research and notes that some restaurants — especially in fine dining — handle anyway. Certain Michelin-starred restaurants spend hours each week digging into guests’ social media profiles to predict their preferences, and San Francisco’s Lazy Bear maintains a database of 115,000 past guests in case they ever come back. Menter tells me that the Austin restaurant where she works tracks some of these details too. There are practical notes, like which customers always arrive late and who has a tendency to be a no-show, but also more personal touches — there’s the guy who always brings first dates, so there’s a note for staff to act like they’ve not seen him before, or the couple who are veterans and would both prefer to be seated with their backs to a wall and a view of the exit.
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