I listened to Travis Kalanick discuss his latest round so you don’t have to.

Last week, Travis Kalanick announced that his company, Atoms, had raised $1.7 billion to support …

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“When did making reservations get so annoying?” Eater asked earlier this month.

Finding the right table now includes one or more of the following: frustrating app interfaces, confusing credit card agreements, competition for the hottest spots and searching for a restaurant across multiple booking platforms, including an important new entrant.

In the piece, Eater journalist Bettina Makalintal actually calls reservation-making “user-experience hell.”

“When did the very act of making a reservation or finding one get so tedious, requiring all this cross-referencing and Google searching and the downloading of so many separate apps?” Makalintal asks.

Answer: Well, uh, how much time do you have?

Anecdotally, the rise in reservation frustration correlates with the decline of spontaneity and delight. This shift feels part social or even generational, ushered in by the so-called “whimsy killers in our pockets,” a fitting nickname for a smartphone coined by writer Ali Francis in a relatable Best Food Blog post.

We’re planning, we’re researching, we’re booking ahead to secure the best possible spot. This peaked in urgency during the pandemic, when advance bookings and vaccination screenings replaced walk-ins. Along the way, both diners and restaurants grew more and more dependent on the reservations services. Diners wanted access, restaurants needed operational support.

The apps promise restaurants a level of optimization that’s necessary to survive through tumultuous periods of record inflation and dwindling margins. Good software offers faster table turns and more engaged guests while removing much of the logistical guesswork for floor staff — the tablet at the host stand tells them where to seat you, and, increasingly, who you are and what you like.

At the same time, the apps’ promise to diners has gotten murkier.

What was once pitched as consumer-facing convenience — push button, book table — has evolved into a multi-layered, often multi-step experience that’s changed the way we find restaurants and plan our visits. The apps aggregate demand, and the more we use them, the stronger the sales pitch to restaurants as top solutions not only for the convenience of booking, but also for demand generation — putting butts in seats, the only booking metric that really matters.

Expect more change.

I don’t have inside information, but I do have related evidence.

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Uber has not been secretive about its desire to buy Berlin, Germany-based Delivery Hero. After a years-long courtship that included Uber eventually buying up 37 percent of the company’s shares, the companies have come to an acquisition agreement: Uber will pay Delivery Hero shareholders €41.50 per share, a deal valuing the European company at €13 billion or close to $15 billion USD in an acquisition that, once completed, makes Uber the largest food delivery group outside of China1.

It’s the latest move in what’s become a global arms race to expand geographically and win market share in delivery. But, more importantly, Uber’s leaders say restaurant and grocery delivery is critical to the company’s overall growth, core rideshare business included.

“Delivery Hero is a natural extension of the cross-platform strategy we’ve been executing for years,” Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said last week on a call announcing the proposed transaction.

It’s true. Uber has leaned into the full breadth of its platform to grow, tweaking its product to turn mobility (rideshare) app users into delivery customers and delivery customers into mobility customers. So far, it’s worked. Now, a new global expansion of Uber’s delivery business becomes a spectacular opportunity to convert more of its existing rideshare base to loyal delivery customers and eventually loyalty program subscribers, a program that’s grown to include 50 million people.

“What we’ve demonstrated over and over again is that cross-platform consumers spend 3 to 4x the gross bookings than single platform consumers,” Khosrowshahi said. “This cross-platform work is one of the highest return growth levers that we run on a global basis. There’s very little investment. We’ve already acquired these customers. All we’re doing is cross-selling each other.”

Uber made $961 million from its delivery business in the first three months of the year, a 43 percent increase over the same period in 2025.

That’s a lot, but it could be a lot higher.

Uber’s leadership loves to assert that there’s plenty of room to grow on the path to world delivery domination. (Top competitor DoorDash’s leadership says the same thing.) Khosrowshahi reiterated the sentiment during Uber’s May earnings call, assuring Wall Street that it’s still, “very, very early innings,” for Uber’s rapid delivery expansion outside of cities in the US and abroad. (The delivery business gross bookings also grew in the first quarter, up 23 percent year over year.)

Much of Uber’s growth relies on combining its two biggest businesses, and the company has gotten creative. For example, in Uber’s spring product release, the company announced riders in some cities would soon be able to reserve an Uber Black or Uber Black SUV — the platform’s premium rides offerings — that will arrive with a preordered drink or snack waiting in the vehicle. (I do not hate this.)

Listening to Uber’s execs, it sometimes sounds like restaurant delivery is a means to a happy end for the company’s rideshare business. But linking restaurants and mobility seems to be working both ways for the $145 billion giant.

“We are seeing nearly $15 billion of run rate2 gross bookings for our delivery business coming from our mobility app,” Uber chief financial officer Balaji Krishnamurthy told investors in May, “and 30 percent of our eligible mobility consumers have never even used Uber Eats yet.”

(Then he reminded them, “There’s a lot of headroom here.”)

Today, delivery makes up half of Uber’s gross bookings — and it’s growing faster than mobility, Khosrowshahi said. “When you put these two businesses together, we’re going to be well over $250 billion in gross bookings, which is pretty incredible scale,” he said. Together, Uber and Delivery Hero had over $230 billion in gross bookings last year. Delivery Hero also runs a thriving ads business — ads as a percentage of gross bookings is bigger than Uber’s, Khosrowshahi notes.

Uber believes it can move quickly to technically integrate Delivery Hero and its localized brands, a move Krishnamurthy says gives Uber even more global leverage.

The acquisition is subject to regulatory approval but should close late next year. As part of the deal (and to please German authorities, no doubt), Uber promised to keep Delivery Hero’s Berlin HQ as-is, making no changes to its workforce until “at least” 2029. Uber also promised a hefty €2 billion investment in Germany, including launching autonomous vehicles and partnering with the German auto industry.

“We think we have a clear path to closing,” Khosrowshahi said.

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OpenTable is rewarding diners who are loyal to its platform, potentially downgrading some prestige credit card holders in the process.

The reservations service will grant special access to in-demand tables to repeat OpenTable bookers. At the same time, OpenTable and Visa will sunset the Visa Dining Collection program in the US, which granted priority access to certain Visa credit cardholders. (Maybe you heard me mention that that deal was set to expire last month? Thanks to OpenTable for waiting until I returned from vacation to announce this one.)

OpenTable’s new program, dubbed Gold Tables, gives diners with Gold status — those who book and complete six OpenTable reservations annually — preferred access to tables at 500 restaurants in 50 US cities. As a part of the platform’s Regulars loyalty program, these diners also get priority notifications for reservations and six months of free Uber One membership, offering ride credits and reduced delivery fees thanks to a partnership announced last year.

The US market leader is pitching the program to restaurants as a way to tap its network of valuable and committed guests. According to the company, diners with OpenTable Gold status typically dine out five times as often, spend more, no-show less frequently, and leave three times the amount of reviews.

It’s the latest front in an escalating reservations war as platforms race to lock down top restaurants and loyal diners — a move that reads as both OpenTable playing catch-up and bracing for a high-stakes fight.

More on the bookings business:

Expedite is back from vacation. While I catch up, here are a few stories of note from the last two weeks. More soon!

I have a confession: I’ve never seen an episode of The Bear.

I know. I know. But I can’t be the only one. Restaurant workers’ …uh, beef with industry drama The Bear has been well documented; plenty of people say that the realistic depictions of life inside a high-pressure kitchen can trigger PTSD or just makes watching TV feel like work. (I’ve never worked in a kitchen but I do claim the latter.)

The latest and last season of the show recently landed on Hulu, and it sounds like product placement and brand sponsorships inside the show have overtaken the narrative. I’m not surprised — I do watch most seasons of Wells Fargo-, BMW- and Saratoga Spring Water-sponsoredTop Chef, I get it — but I am a little bummed about product placement with the power to shift a creative narrative. — Best Food Blog ($)

Jersey Mike’s filed for a $12 billion IPO.

A $12 billion initial public offering for a 3,300-restaurant strong sandwich chain is significant. (For context, both Sweetgreen and Cava hit about $5 billion during their IPOs.) Jersey Mike’s, which has yet to announce a date for its public market debut, was acquired last year by PE giant Blackstone for $8 billion. Its CEO, Charlie Morrison, who also led Wingstop’s IPO a decade ago, says the company could grow to 7,500 locations in the US; it’s also planning to open 400 store openings in Ireland and the UK.

The Red Lobster endless shrimp fiasco just keeps giving.

When the 58-year-old seafood chain went under two years ago, its fabled “endless shrimp” promotion (or LTO, limited-time offer, in restaurant lingo) was a compellingly convenient nail-in-the-coffin for framing the brand’s downfall. Poetic, really. But the bigger story of the once-beloved chain’s 2024 fall is more complicated than just underpriced shrimp. A new lawsuit from Red Lobster shareholders alleges that its former majority owner, Thai Union Group, tanked the business on purpose to enrich itself.

“When it was clear that the Everyday $20 Ultimate Endless Shrimp offering was wreaking havoc on Red Lobster and its balance sheet, [interim CEO Paul] Kenny doubled down,” in order to benefit the parent company, the suit alleges. — Fortune

Oh heyyy, the Bay Area has more Michelin stars than New York.

That makes a nice headline, but I agree with San Francisco Standard editor-at-large Sara Deseran, I don’t think of my city as a fine-dining town either. — SF Standard ($)

Wonder will deliver via Zipline drones in Texas next year.

Wonder tested drone delivery in New Jersey, but it’s committing to the bit in Texas. In a March interview, Wonder CEO Tony Hoggett told me that the delivery-forward chain expanded to Texas from the New York City area because of the state’s sprawl and growing population. Wonder plays good in the suburbs, he said. Hoggett previously ran Amazon’s grocery business from Austin, and during our interview I joked that maybe that’s why the company picked Texas as its expansion target — it’s probably easier to court an exec if you start building businesses in their backyard. (While convenient, Hoggett said, that wasn’t the case.)

But beyond its Wonder-friendly suburban sprawl, Texas has become a kind of ground zero for another type of delivery innovation: flying drones. Zipline, a leading drone delivery company, currently operates in major metros in Texas with a large presence in Dallas-Fort Worth. That scale and coverage is convenient for a business built on ultra-fast food delivery. Wonder customers should be able to order Zipline-delivered meals from all its Texas locations by the end of 2027 which could, by that time, total close to 100.— release

Susan Anderson, Uber’s global head of delivery, is leaving the company after 10 years.

“It’s time to take a breath again,” Anderson wrote on LinkedIn.

Liberty Mutual Investments gives InKind $320 million.

The investment arm of an insurance company is backing InKind, a restaurant finance company that gives capital to restaurants, funded by food and drink credits that it sells to diners. It’s an innovative model (I put InKind on the Fast Company Most Innovative list a couple years ago) and one that’s given $600 million in cash to over 7,000 restaurants. InKind will use its new tranche of funding in part to help develop AI-native tools designed to help restaurants on its platform drive demand during slow times. — release

Previously:

In March, I broke a big news story. American Express, parent company of reservations platforms Tock and Resy, cancelled an industry dinner and pulled its support of Noma Los Angeles following allegations of abuse against its head chef. Restaurant tech company Blackbird did, too.

High-end, fine-dining restaurant Noma losing some sponsorships is not the most important angle of this story — but I do believe it is the most consequential. It was also a just-right Expedite story, and I’m proud to have broken this news (and gotten nods in major publications from the New York Times to Food & Wine and beyond.)

That story is, by an order of magnitude, the biggest of the year so far. It’s contributed to record growth in subscriber numbers, pageviews, and even free-to-paid conversions this year. Expedite remains proudly independent (ethics policy here!) and I am also proud of the publication I’ve built.

I’m on vacation this week, so for posterity, here are some links back to more consequential stories as reported in the best newsletter about the future of restaurants.

Thanks, as always, for reading. I couldn’t do it without you.

-Kristen

Today’s edition of Expedite is unlocked, courtesy of Eater.

Download Eater's brand new app for iOS

Finding the right restaurant is both a science and an art. Recent tech advances have the science on lock; there’s no shortage of service and apps and sites and social media accounts vying for attention with promises of perfect and personalized restaurant suggestions for any occasion. The art is much, much trickier. Even in an age of unprecedented technological progress, it requires a distinctly human touch.

The way we discover restaurants has quickly and dramatically evolved. Take generative artificial intelligence — AI that can talk to you — for example. It’s considered the fastest-adopted technology… ever. And while plenty of us are using it, we’re all still learning how to live with it.

In a 2025 global study from the University of Melbourne, well over half (66 percent) of respondents used AI tools regularly, but fewer than half (46 percent) said they don’t yet trust it. More recently, in an annual report published in April, the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI determined that artificial intelligence is advancing faster than our ability to both understand and trust it. The companies behind major models like Claude and ChatGPT release a near constant drip of updates, and tech that wows today could be obsolete in a matter of months.

That sounds scary. (It is kind of scary.) We can’t stop the inevitable march of technological progress, but we can lean into the things that make us feel most human.

I was thinking about this tension when the team at Eater, the 20-year-old restaurant news publication, told me they’d launched a new mobile app earlier this year. A new app? Now? But then I talked to Stephanie Wu, Eater’s editor-in-chief, about the reasoning behind launching something new — now — and also the evolution of restaurant search, discovery, and recommendations in an age of artificial intelligence.

“On the Eater team, we talk frequently about the fact that robots can’t go to a restaurant, experience the service, soak in the atmosphere, or taste the food,” she said. “Dining is a deeply human experience — not just the act of eating but also the community that’s built when dining with others.”

Our conversation continues below. Like all Expedite Q&As, it has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Expedite: Do you think restaurants have a good understanding of how their diners find them?

Steph Wu, Eater: “Owning a restaurant has never been an easy task, and I think it’s only become more difficult as the discovery landscape has shifted so rapidly. A diner might come across a restaurant on TikTok, check its rating on Yelp or read about it on Reddit, book through Resy, and then post on Instagram. This is extremely hard to track, particularly for first-time visitors, and especially when independent operators are making so many other decisions simultaneously, from POS and reservation platforms to investing in PR agencies, managing deliveries and pickup orders, and everything else that has to work within their famously thin margins.

“While we cover the news and identify what’s new and exciting in markets across the country, we’re also a powerful record of what’s good and worth it, including restaurants that have been around for decades. Our work has undeniable impact.”

Do you have any concerns about the way restaurant discovery is evolving? Or how quickly it’s evolving? I’m thinking, specifically, about influencers and about AI.

SW: “In our ongoing user research around dining discovery, it’s common to hear distrust around the larger influencer landscape. It’s hard to tell when a recommendation is genuine if a meal has been paid for by the restaurant. And more and more, we’re hearing restaurants share more openly when they’ve been approached by influencers that are demanding payment on top of a free meal in exchange for a post. That’s absolutely not to belittle the restaurants who do invest in these lower-lift marketing tactics, particularly in smaller markets or when they can’t afford a full PR agency. But from a diner’s perspective, it’s become harder and harder to spot genuine recommendations, and at a time where the costs of dining out have gone up immensely, people want to ensure they’re finding a great meal every time.

“The AI question is certainly something we’re watching closely in the long term. When someone asks an AI agent where to eat in a new city, the response is likely pulled from a multitude of sources, and then flattened to create a generic recommendation that’s meant to appeal to as many types of diners as possible. Eater will always be a brand run by extremely opinionated humans who love restaurants, and I don’t see the value of that going away anytime soon.“

Eater just launched a new mobile app. How does it fit into the restaurant discovery and recommendation landscape?

SW: “Historically, Eater on the web has been focused on discovery and inspiration and helping you understand the wider world of restaurants and restaurant culture. This app is first and foremost as a utility. It is a place where you can take all the incredible work we’ve done — spread out across all the ways that the internet works — and hone in on: ‘I need a place to eat. Tell me where to go.’

“The number-one strength of this app, obviously, is that it is built on our editorial content. We update our editorial content every single day, maps publishing every single day. That is like the crux of what you’re going to find in the app. The content comes directly from our editorial team. It’s the work that we’ve done for two decades. Our editors are dining out all the time, more frequently than I can even wrap my head around.”

I grew up with Eater; we launched, professionally, around the same time. That makes it a legacy brand in the restaurant industry. How do you keep it relevant?

SW: “We recognize that Eater is a brand that is really meaningful to an audience that’s been following us for a really long time — maybe not all 20 years — but certainly there’s the brand and the association. At the same time, we very much recognize there’s much more of a shift toward wanting to know individual Eater editors and their voices. We are not this broad, nameless entity. That shift is nothing new, it’s been a thing for publications to put their editors and staff front-facing for some time.

“But most of all, I believe the biggest value of Eater is that our audience cares deeply about food and dining out, and will very gladly share with others when they’ve found a restaurant they love. They’re loyal to great places, and that makes our audience hugely valuable to any restaurant owner. After all, it’s the regulars that ensure restaurants stay in business in the long term.”

Thanks again to my friends at Eater for sponsoring this edition of Expedite.

🏝 Expedite is on summer vacation this week! Please enjoy this guest post by my friend and fellow restaurant journalist Gloria Dawson, who recently launched In the Weeds, a publication about the business of independent restaurants.

Subscribe to In the Weeds

The Baker’s Table offers an approachable, thoughtful tasting menu that changes monthly and, thanks to its membership program, welcomes many familiar faces.

In 2018, however, when the restaurant first opened, “it could not have been further from where we are now,” said Chef and Owner Dave Willocks. They were serving breakfast, lunch, and brunch and “got lucky” thanks to some early press and accolades for the Newport, Kentucky, restaurant, he said. His luck ran out with the pandemic.

“After Covid hit, it was like nothing that worked for me worked anymore. We were just bleeding money so bad. Even I barely know how we made it [through Covid]. During that time, I started to say to myself, if I’m gonna survive, I have to really study business. I have to study how to run a restaurant,” he told me during a phone call in April.

Part of his restaurant education came from conversations with The Baker’s Table’s most loyal diners, many of them from nearby Cincinnati. He invited them in for an espresso and a snack and asked them what they loved about the restaurant and how they could base the restaurant around what diners want, he said.

Diners were looking for a stronger relationship with the restaurant. Someplace where they were known. Dave wanted to deepen relationships, too, and find stability in this inherently unstable business.

“The membership as it exists right now really came out of those conversations,” he said. “The normal restaurant model is butts in seats, right? You want to do as many covers as humanly possible every week, every month, every day. Do whatever you have to do to get those covers. You don’t really know where they’re coming from, but you just hope they’re coming. So we started reimagining.”

Dave introduced the idea of a membership program during those conversations with diners and got a positive response. But he was surprised by the immediate interest he saw. They got about 25 sign-ups 24 hours after opening memberships, which launched in June of last year. Currently, they have about 78 members who pay $180 a month. In return, members receive $200 each month to spend on their house account. (They still welcome traditional diners, and Dave said being named a James Beard semifinalist for best regional chef has helped boost that traffic.)

The restaurant works to develop a personal relationship with each member. For the restaurant, that means “really detailed, meticulous notes about our members.” Allergies, spouses’ names, family members’ names, table preferences. The restaurant works to remove all friction points, including the bill, which is automatically put on the member’s account, said Dave.

“I think the center of it all is changing the orientation of the restaurant’s focus from turning tables of miscellaneous faces that we don’t know to developing deeper relationships with people that really vibe with where we’re at,” he said.

The tech side of membership is managed by The Third Place, which also offers services like marketing and e-commerce to restaurants. CEO and Co-Founder Vivien Sin views restaurant membership as a way to help diners break away from the social media culture, “where it’s about checklists, it’s about hitting as many restaurants as possible,” she said. “It’s actually a different level of joy when you also develop depth with a restaurant and repeatedly see it throughout a chef’s journey.”

While restaurant membership got some buzz shortly after the pandemic, it hasn’t caught on widely, which surprises Dave. It’s the business model he’d recommend to others in the industry, he said.

“Running a restaurant is so hard right now, and this membership program really changes everything about the back end of how your cash flow works,” Dave said. As he studied the model, he realized, “I know what my expenses are. If I got to a certain number of members, I would open the month automatically profitable, and that is the idea that blew my brain.”

He insists that membership could work at almost any restaurant.

The hardest part might be explaining the value proposition to potential members and marketing the membership program. Marketing, he said, was part of his restaurant education after COVID.

Membership “requires being more thoughtful” and asking, “‘What is your experience? What is the nature of what you’re offering? Why would someone want to come back?’ You have to answer those questions first, which, if you’re a business, you probably should,” he said. Restaurant membership “is something that I would love to see exploding nationwide, but it requires doing the work.”

Toast is looking for a new kind of restaurant partner. The point of sale and payments company is actively recruiting an operator to build a new restaurant concept in Boston alongside the tech company’s product teams.

Toast will fund the opening — or at least “help” to fund the opening — per a release. The selected operator will enjoy a direct line to Toast’s executive team and early access to all the company’s tech. Toast calls the initiative Toast Lab, a fitting title for an experimental proving ground of sorts. Interested (and aspiring!) restaurants can apply through July 14, but the contest is limited to existing Toast operators who have used the platform for more than six months. Specifics of the deal, including the amount of funding and any potential ownership stake or controlling interest, will be decided after the operator is selected before the end of the year.

We’ve seen this kind of collaboration before.

DoorDash has dabbled in restaurant operations; Square has helped to document openings and once opened its own proof-of-concept brick-and-mortar around the corner from my house. Tech companies get a real-life proving ground for their products and, in the case of a successful restaurant, years or even decades of promotion. I can already imagine the press release headlines: Toast made this restaurant an overnight success!

I’m happy to see restaurant technology companies supporting restaurants (or, in this case, restaurant) in this way. But interested parties should definitely read the fine print:

“Applicant grants Toast a non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, fully sublicensable, worldwide license to use, reproduce, modify, and create derivative works from materials submitted as part of the Application (”Submission Materials”) for any business purpose. Toast may independently develop concepts similar to those in Applicant’s Submission Materials, and nothing herein restricts Toast’s right to do so. Applicant represents that it has the right to submit all materials included in the Application. Applicant should not include any information it considers trade secret or proprietary unless willing to do so subject to these Terms.”

“It’s not very DoorDash-y,” the insider said.

Indeed, the post struck me as different from DoorDash’s typical buttoned-up communications style, though it was in line with SevenRooms’ direct style of messaging. I always appreciate the candor (one could also call it “the drama”). SevenRooms has a history of beefing with OpenTable; I’m ever-so-slightly delighted that the practice has continued under its new owner.

Now, it’s a lot clearer why Page flagged the changes.

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On Monday morning, American Express announced its plans to acquire European reservations platform TheFork for $700 million in cash. The deal is expected to close later this year subject to regulatory approval and, when completed, will bring the total number of bookable venues on the American Express network — those on Amex-owned Resy, Tock, and TheFork — to 75,000, per a release.

Assuming everyone’s accurately reporting their inventory, that’s more reservable spots than OpenTable’s global roster of 65,000 restaurants, a shift that would unseat the once-undisputed category leader.

“Our card members love restaurants, and it’s exciting to see the opportunity for dining to become a greater part of our membership model globally,” Pablo Rivero, Resy CEO and American Express svp of global dining, posted on LinkedIn.

A representative for American Express told me that following the closing of the potential acquisition, TheFork and Resy would operate as separate platforms. “We expect TheFork to continue operating under its existing leadership, brand and platform,” they said.

Additionally, TheFork would be part of Amex’s international card business, they said, partnering with Resy to connect the company’s full global dining network.

Restaurants on Tock received a similar message when that acquisition was announced years ago. “As you may know, American Express owns Resy,” Tock CEO Matt Tucker wrote partner restaurants in 2024. “When the deal closes, Tock and Resy will continue to remain separate businesses.”

“Dining is one of the most important ways people engage with our brand,” said Rafa Marquez, president of international card services at American Express, in a statement. “Over time, the proposed acquisition would help us enrich our differentiated membership model by offering card members more ways to discover, book and access great restaurants.”

American Express has been aggressively growing its reservations network by acquisition. In 2019 it bought Resy for a sum that was never officially confirmed but rumored at $200 million. It acquired reservations platform Tock for $400 million in 2024 and later this summer will move its 8,000 venues to Resy, dismantling the Tock brand and boosting Resy’s bookable venue count to 25,000.

TheFork launched in 2007 in France as LaFourchette and was acquired by TripAdvisor in 2014; its restaurants span 11 countries with many concentrated in major cities like Paris, London, and Rome. According to TripAdvisor, TheFork earned $232 million in revenue in the 12 months ending March 31.

Related coverage:

More news:

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A year ago in May, DoorDash announced it would acquire reservations service SevenRooms for $1.2 billion. The deal shook up the reservations business as SevenRooms’s deeply entrenched incumbents, Resy and OpenTable, navigated a rapidly evolving landscape alongside a newly enriched competitor.

SevenRooms launched in 2011. Its founding executives continue to lead the company today, and SevenRooms is operating more or less independently from its delivery giant overlords. (Even under DoorDash, SevenRooms leadership has forcefully criticized its competition.)

But DoorDash is taking advantage of SevenRooms’ role as a reservations and customer relationship management platform, pulling elements of its tech into the DoorDash app. In the first quarter of 2026, DoorDash says the pace of restaurants signing up with SevenRooms has accelerated significantly. The company didn’t share numbers to back this claim but assured investors in May that “Our progress so far gives us confidence to continue investing in these areas.”

The reservations business has entered a new era. I joke (but am also serious) that the DoorDash-SevenRooms deal keeps me relevant as a business writer. There’s a lot of nuance in this story — every time I cover the business for an outside publication, my editors push back with a ton of clarifying questions — and I am in deep.

DoorDash launched its in-app reservations product, DoorDash Reservations, in the fall. It’s live in a handful of US and Australian cities. More recently, it added reservations in London (and, apparently, Dubai) via Deliveroo, the delivery company it acquired at the same time as SevenRooms for $3.9 billion. (Those bookings are called, fittingly, Deliveroo Reservations and they operate similarly to DoorDash Reservations.)

To most outsiders, including Wall Street, reservations are a small part of DoorDash’s overall business. No analysts mentioned them during DoorDash’s first quarter earnings call in May. In fact, investors don’t seem to care too much about the nitty-gritty of the bookings business; Resy only occasionally makes an appearance during American Express financial reports and Booking Holdings hasn’t offered meaningful mentions of OpenTable on an earnings call in longer than I can remember. (Which reminds me that I’m still not sure why Booking owns OpenTable.)

So! A year into this renewed competition, I have some very specific questions about the future of the bookings business and who might come out on top.

I have fewer answers. Let’s discuss.

1. Will the platforms lean into similarities or highlight differences?

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It’s not that the personalized emails I received from a handful of full-service restaurants were too personal… it’s that they were far too similar.

Here’s what happened: My birthday is coming up. I’m not particularly secretive about it and have grown accustomed, almost indifferent, to the string of marketing emails, birthday discounts, and well-wishes that arrive each June. Last Friday, exactly one month before my birthday, I received three emails from managers at restaurants in different cities. Each email addressed me by name, acknowledged my upcoming birthday and invited me in to celebrate. Nice, right?

It was nice! But a little strange since I’d dined at each of these restaurants just one time. None are located in my home city. One, I visited in New York about a year ago. Another, in Los Angeles, I visited at least three years ago. (It may have been four.) The third, a delightful spot in Nashville, I visited nine years ago. Each hoped I’d come back, they said.

I wish I could! But I’ll be more than a thousand miles away from all of these places on my birthday. (And most other days, too.)

As best I can tell, these emails arrived via a third-party loyalty platform that taps into restaurant customer data to optimize and personalize engagement. It’s powerful hospitality when done right, but a little unnerving when done en masse.

I must’ve ended up in a specific marketing segment inside the system, something like: Frequent diner with upcoming birthday who’s only been to this restaurant once. I assume the loyalty platform knows enough about me to understand that I am fiercely loyal to a handful of my favorite spots, and I do tend to linger, first over wine, then tea. I think I’m a good tipper and a fairly low-maintenance customer. (Sorry to that one restaurant where my children once broke two glasses by spilling water on the tablecloth twice, I definitely don’t expect a personalized return invite, oof.)

Instead of making me feel special, these emails made me feel like a commodity. Taken together, the invitations, arriving seemingly out of the blue and within hours of each other, diluted their message. Good tech and great data can make for excellent personalized service. But it’s hard to surprise and delight a diner when lots of restaurants are using the same information to do the same things.

Everyone wants to scale a personalized touch.

AI-fueled personalized marketing and engagement efforts might improve this. They might also make it worse.

According to National Restaurant Association survey data released earlier this year, 56 percent of full-service restaurant operators believe marketing technology has had a “significant effect” on their restaurant over the last couple of years. Things like personalization and increased segmentation and even automated messaging help engage diners and reduce the lift for operators who are already stretched thin. That tech is only getting smarter; in the same survey, operators indicated they used artificial intelligence tools for restaurant marketing more than any other function.

This was easy enough to see coming. Advances in generative AI have commoditized written communication, and smart marketing tools segment a dataset into targetable buckets of consumers. I once asked a restaurant tech company that offered suggested, AI-assisted messages to restaurants if they were concerned too much repetition might dilute the message.

“We have a template library of best-performing campaigns that operators can use as inspiration,” they said. “All of our customers […] are very good at bringing their distinct brand voice and imagery to their marketing efforts.”

Will it be enough? Maybe not.

I did write back to one of the restaurants. I appreciated the invitation, I said, but was surprised to receive it given how far away I live. I promised to come back and visit when I’m back in town, I said.

I never heard back.

It took some time, but reservations industry leaders finally ‘fessed up to offering restaurants money to sign on as partners. Restaurants are incentivized to hold tables for high-value guests, compensated through event sponsorship or marketing programs, and, sometimes, simply doled out incremental cash over the course of a contract.

No reservations platform wants to own this narrative, but most admit just a small fraction of America’s restaurants actually get paid. (I get the sense if you put the leaders of these companies in a room together, they might agree to abandon the practice entirely… or at least rein it in.)

Since terms of individual deals vary and are bound by non-disclosure agreements, it’s impossible to generalize this phenomenon. But the dynamic is changing the relationship between restaurants and their tech providers, and that’s definitely worth discussing. This post gets in the weeds, my very favorite place to be. Thanks for reading!

Late last year during a work trip, I was switching between the London Underground and Overground when a source called me. I’d never believe how much a restaurant group in New York was paid to help launch DoorDash’s new reservations platform, they said.

I ducked against a wall in the busy station and the source shared an eye-watering sum. I knew immediately that my source was right about at least one thing: I didn’t believe it.

“Holy sh*t,” I said, my American affect far too loud and aggressive for the buttoned-up British rush hour. Heads turned and I waved a hand to assure concerned commuters I was fine. Over the phone I asked, “Are you sure?” over and over.

The number — high seven figures — was an order of magnitude higher than any I’d heard before. Resy and OpenTable had been openly beefing for years at that point, one-upping each other as they poached partner restaurants and wrote checks to top partners. I’d heard plenty of chatter of big money — like, low-seven-figure deals — paid to secure high-profile restaurants under years-long contracts. I had not heard of any deal that approached this sum.

Since that day in London, I’ve heard whispers of more big paydays tied to exclusive reservations contracts that stretch into eight figures, but I’ve sadly never seen a signed contract containing final terms. Without that level of proof, this indie journalist (literally) can’t afford to misreport the financial details, so I’ve left them out.

As a public company, DoorDash’s finances are a matter of public record. Still, it’s impossible to find any proof of large payments to partner restaurants inside its balance sheets; the company is so massive that a huge payout by reservations industry standards amounts to a rounding error for the delivery behemoth. For context, DoorDash spent $746 million on sales and marketing in just the first quarter of 2026. Last year, it spent just under $2.5 billion on companywide sales and marketing efforts.

For purposes of this newsletter, though, let’s assume it’s true, that DoorDash is cutting checks far higher than any of its established competitors to win more restaurants.

What? What?! Why?

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Ryan told me that he hasn’t run into any trouble with reservations services — I’ve heard reports of agents being flagged as bots and banned — but, he said, “I only do it for my own use, so I probably don’t hit them that much to make it a problem.”

How I went from ‘wouldn’t it be cool if?’ to a fully functional AI agent that finds, checks, monitors, and books restaurants, from my phone, in a single weekend:

I stopped checking. I built something to check for me. It got me an impossible table in nine days.

I am, genuinely, someone who cares too much about restaurants. When I’m traveling to a city, I’m doing recon weeks in advance, triangulating across sources, trying to land the right table at the right place for the right night. It’s one of the real pleasures of life, and I take it seriously.

The problem: the tooling is broken. There are too many reservation platforms that have carved out different swaths of the restaurant world, and they don’t talk to each other. You have to remember which restaurants are on which system, bounce between apps, and (most maddeningly) if you want a table at that place everyone’s talking about and it’s full, there’s no good way to know when a slot opens up short of refreshing it manually like a maniac.

So I built a solution. And the interesting part of the story isn’t the reservation agent itself. It’s how I built it, and what that reveals about where AI tooling is right now.

The Build: A /resi Skill for OpenClaw

OpenClaw’s skills are essentially modules: a folder with a SKILL.md describing the capability and the CLI tooling the agent should use. When I message my agent, it reads the relevant skills and decides which to invoke.

I wanted a single skill that handled everything restaurant-related. I called it /resi.

The core functions I needed:

1. Restaurant search: given a city, date, party size, and time window, find available tables across the major reservation platforms. Not “here’s a list of restaurants,” but actual availability right now.

2. Open times lookup: for a specific restaurant I already know I want, what’s available? Give me the slots.

3. Availability monitor: this is the killer feature. Tell the system I want a table at Restaurant X on Date Y for N people, and have it poll until something opens, then notify me immediately via WhatsApp.

I opened Claude Code, described what I wanted, and started iterating.

“I want to build a CLI tool that can search restaurant availability, check open times for a specific restaurant, and set up a monitor that polls and notifies me when a slot opens. It needs to work across [Platform A] and [Platform B]. The output should be clean JSON so an LLM can parse it.”

And then Claude Code just… built it. Not all at once. We went back and forth, debugged auth flows, handled rate limiting, structured the outputs. But the arc from “idea” to “working CLI” was measured in hours, not days. I didn’t write most of the code. I directed it, reviewed it, and made judgment calls.

The resulting skill has three clean CLI entry points:

resi search --city amsterdam --date 2026-03-15 --party 2 --time “20:00”
resi open-times --restaurant “Restaurant Name” --date 2026-03-15 --party 2
resi monitor --restaurant “Restaurant Name” --date 2026-03-15 --party 2 --notify whatsapp

The monitor function runs as a background process on my local machine. When a slot opens, it fires a WhatsApp message to me directly. I’ve already snagged two tables I would have missed entirely.

What This Actually Looks Like in Practice

From my phone, I can now message my agent things like:

“Find me a good table in Amsterdam for Saturday night, 2 people, anywhere from 8 to 10pm.”

The agent invokes resi search, parses the results, filters for places that match my taste profile (it knows my restaurant list, a curated CSV of around 50 Amsterdam spots I’ve fed into its knowledge base), and comes back with a ranked list of available tables with times and direct booking links.

Or:

“Set up a monitor for [that impossible-to-get restaurant] on the 22nd for 2 people.”

It spins up the background monitor. I go about my life. My phone buzzes when something opens.

This is the kind of thing that used to require either a premium third-party service, a lot of manual effort, or knowing someone. Now it’s a WhatsApp message.

The Bigger Point: What Vibe Coding Actually Means

I want to be careful here, because “vibe coding” has become a bit of a meme, and like most memes, it’s half right and half misleading.

The half that’s right: you genuinely can build functional, useful software without being a professional developer. The tooling has crossed a threshold. I came up with the restaurant agent idea, described what I wanted in plain English, and Claude Code produced working code. The iteration loops were fast. The bugs got fixed. The thing works.

The half that’s misleading: this is not magic, and it is not zero-effort. What I actually brought to this:

• Product intuition. I knew exactly what I wanted to build and why. I’d thought through the UX: what the agent should say, what edge cases to handle, what “done” looked like. Inspected HTML, nudged it, edited it.

• System architecture sense. Knowing to keep the CLI outputs as clean JSON for LLM consumption, knowing to separate the monitor as a background process, knowing how to structure a skill in OpenClaw.

• Debugging judgment. When Claude Code produced something that didn’t work, I had enough context to diagnose why and redirect. It’s less like having a junior dev write code for you and more like pair programming with someone very fast and very literal.

What I didn’t need: deep expertise in any of the APIs I was hitting, fluency in the specific language patterns Claude used, or patience for reading through documentation. Claude Code handled all of that.

The net effect is a dramatic compression of the “idea to working software” timeline. Probably 10x for someone like me. Maybe 3–5x for a senior engineer who’d have built it faster anyway.

But honestly, the metric that matters most to me isn’t speed. It’s that building software is fun again.

For a long time, the part I dreaded wasn’t the idea or the product thinking. It was everything before you could actually see something work: setting up the environment, getting dependencies right, remembering syntax, fighting config. The activation energy to go from “I want to build X” to “I am building X” was high enough that a lot of ideas just died in the gap.

That gap is basically gone now. I can dream something up, act like a good product and engineering manager directing a very capable team, and watch it get built. The creative loop is tight. The fun part is almost the whole thing.

Why This Matters (and Who This Is For)

If you’re a hacker, a founder, or a technical leader who has ever had the experience of knowing exactly what tool you want but not having the time or bandwidth to build it, this is your moment.

The combination of OpenClaw as persistent infrastructure, Claude Code for fast iteration on the actual build, and Claude as the reasoning layer that ties it all together is genuinely powerful in a way that feels qualitatively different from “AI helps me write code faster.”

I have a personal agent now. It runs on hardware I control, with data that stays private, and it’s extensible because the skills system is just files. Every new workflow I want is a new skill. I’m building one now for travel planning, but that’s another post.

The restaurant agent cost me a weekend of focused time and a few dollars in API calls. It has already returned value that I’d have happily paid $30/month for as a subscription. That math is going to keep getting more favorable.

Building Your Own

If you want to try this yourself:

1. Get OpenClaw running locally and connect it to WhatsApp or Telegram. The setup wizard handles most of the complexity, and running it on a Mac with always-on power is all you need.

2. Build the CLI tool first using Claude Code before you think about the skill wrapper. Describe the functions you want, let Claude Code iterate, and focus your energy on reviewing outputs and catching edge cases. Aim for clean JSON output so the agent can parse results without friction.

3. Write the SKILL.md last. Once the CLI works, describing it to the agent is straightforward. The SKILL.md just tells OpenClaw what the skill does and how to invoke it. Claude figures out the rest.

For the restaurant piece specifically, the core challenge is handling auth against the reservation platforms gracefully and building a polling mechanism that doesn’t hammer their servers. Claude Code knows how to do both. Just be clear about what you want and iterate on the edge cases.

What’s Really Going On Here

Step back from the restaurant agent for a second and look at what’s actually been assembled.

OpenClaw is a persistent agent that lives in your chat interface and knows everything about you: your calendar, your preferences, your history, your communication patterns, your files. It’s always on, always accessible from your phone, and it accumulates context over time. That alone is powerful.

Claude Code lets you vibe code a new action layer on top of that in an afternoon. Whatever you can describe, you can build. The CLI becomes a skill. The skill becomes something your agent can invoke on your behalf, from anywhere, triggered by a natural language message.

The combination is what’s special. You’re not just automating a task. You’re extending what your agent can do in the world, backed by everything it already knows about you. The restaurant agent works better because it knows my taste profile. A travel planning skill will work better because it knows my calendar. Every new capability compounds on the context that’s already there.

That’s the architecture worth getting excited about. The restaurant reservations are just a fun place to start.

At this week’s Google I/O developer conference, the tech giant shared plans for Gemini Spark, a “24/7 personal AI agent“ that works inside Google’s products like docs and Gmail, handling tasks on a user’s behalf, cleaning out inboxes, summarizing meetings, automating workflows. Spark follows the debut and subsequent explosion in popularity of OpenClaw, an open-source virtual AI assistant that lives inside chat and messaging apps. Agentic AI — bots that act for you instead of just talking to you — is moving fast from concept to product.

Agentic bots are practical. Users can ask for what they want in natural language and, provided it’s armed with the right information, the agent delivers. For example, you might give a bot access to your location, DoorDash login, and food preferences and tell it to order a pizza. It can, in theory, pick a restaurant, place an order, and get you a pizza. (I have not tried this yet but if you have please tell me!)

During an earnings call earlier this month, DoorDash reported record human interest in its platforms. The company recorded highs in both monthly active users and membership during the first three months of the year. It also reported $4 billion in revenue, up 33 percent year over year, and 933 million orders, a 27 percent increase.

But never mind those numbers, because Wall Street wanted to talk about AI! (Wall Street usually wants to talk about AI.) This time, analysts on the call wondered how agentic AI might help or hurt DoorDash’s future profits.

Is DoorDash worried, one analyst asked, that personal AI agents might layer themselves in between the on-demand marketplace and the consumer? Is DoorDash at risk of becoming a logistics offering to these agentic overlords?

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Today, Blink is announcing a $17 million investment from Enlightened Hospitality Investments, the private equity fund tied to celebrated New York restaurateur Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group. Meyer was eager to invest in the company after he saw it in action at Shake Shack, the nearly 700-unit fast casual restaurant he opened as a single hot dog stand in 2001.

“We would not quit knocking on the door until you opened it,” he reminded Nolan during a recent joint interview exclusive to Expedite. (There’s some discrepancy about how long this process took, but those involved agree it’s a good match.)

Founded in London but now Boston-based, Blink builds communication tools that connect teams inside large organizations. It integrates others, like HR and payroll platform Workday, offering employees at companies including McDonald’s, Dollar Tree, and Domino’s Pizza a single mobile super-app to manage their work life. The app connects people across levels and locations at scale with group chat and other comms functions, giving workers a voice and sense of agency. Blink’s promise is that better understanding and communication, especially among a large and distributed workforce, will increase both worker satisfaction and customer experience and service. According to the company, its customers see up to a 26 percent reduction in frontline employee turnover.

Blink started outside of restaurants; it first served other service industries like transportation, healthcare, and logistics.

“But actually it’s in the quick-service and retail sectors where we’ve seen the most growth,” Nolan said.

It’s growing fast. Last year, Blink added some 700,000 users in the hospitality sector. Employee adoption of self-service tools like shift-swapping grew fourfold.

That’s in part because Blink understands how to engage a young and tech-savvy workforce.

For instance, company leaders can post short TikTok-style videos to share news and announcements or even live-stream inside the app to show off examples of, say, great customer service, smart store design, or a particularly engaging display.

“It doesn’t need to be perfect,” Nolan said. “Post that on the internal Blink, and that drives more sense of togetherness and belonging and transparency and authenticity inside the organization than any pre-prepared press release or statement or anything else.”

Admittedly, Blink does not have the algorithmic power nor entertainment value of a TikTok scroll session, though on average, workers open the app seven times per day. But if you want to engage a digitally native workforce, surfacing important info in a way they can easily understand and engage with it is the way to go.

“The best part about it is that the employees enjoy it,” Meyer said. “It doesn’t feel like it’s something being imposed upon them.”

Here’s another example: Recently, Nolan told me, an enterprise restaurant brand used Blink to introduce and hype a new menu item to restaurant workers across the country. Restaurant execs posted videos explaining the change and the philosophy behind it; the company introduced some friendly competition with an in-app game that tested employees’ knowledge of the new item and its ingredients.

Blink’s employee-engagement mission fits into the Enlightened Hospitality Investments mold.

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