It’s clear that professional influencers have changed the restaurant industry for better or worse, but the role is in the spotlight again af…

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Their beef (mostly) stemmed from a single phrase in the notification: system of record. In March, the 28-year-old reservations platform emailed its restaurant customers to flag new language in the TOS requiring them to use OpenTable as the restaurant’s system of record — its primary source for reservations, table and guest management.

The clarification came amid increasing stakes in the bookings business. Page, who, to be clear, leads a direct OpenTable competitor, said the only way for restaurants to comply is to “make OpenTable the center of gravity and manually reconcile everything else into it.” That’s obviously not in her company’s best interest — and Page also argued that it’s not in a restaurant’s best interest, either.

SevenRooms has always marketed itself as a way for restaurants to get closer to their booking data, no matter where any given reservation originated. In June, SevenRooms released a product called Channel Connect, designed to pull reservations and guest info from multiple channels. “Guest data is centralized into a single system of record, with secure, permissioned access across connected platforms,” it promises.

This came months after original TOS kerfuffle, including the system of record language, got enough attention that OpenTable had to clarify its position.

“OpenTable’s client agreement citing usage of OpenTable as System of Record isn’t a new term or a new way of working with many of our partners,” a company rep later said in statement emailed to numerous outlets. “By extending our System of Record standard to all partners, we are ensuring a single source of truth that protects guest and restaurant data, maintains real-time availability, and guarantees that when a guest books a table, it actually exists.”

Ah, yes, welcome to the chat, single source of truth, a close cousin of system of record and a phrase that’s equally as technical. The so-called reservations wars have a new front: the underlying technical architecture that powers them.

Before they showed up in restaurant tech discourse, the terms ‘system of record’ and ‘single source of truth’ were more technical terms.

I asked my favorite technical source, my husband who’s a career software engineer, to help. He explained the terms in context I understand:

Imagine a shared Google Doc that a few people work from, he said. That doc, which tracks changes and allows multiple inputs from varying sources, is a system of record. The same doc, holding many pieces of info, might be the single source of truth, or it could be compiled with information from multiple sources of truth. Regardless, a single source of truth exists when we (collective we!) decide that there is one, true, absolute version of a piece of information, no matter how many copies (like, say, an old Word doc circulating via email) exist.

I love an authoritative source.

My frenemies Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude and their large language model peers, do too. When I — or the AI — produce(s) a piece of written work, an answer to a question, or just an appropriate response, we seek authority. My strength is human judgement and decades of experience… and while the bots care less about these attributes (rude) they still seek authority. A useful, non-hallucinating AI system needs access to one authoritative truth; otherwise the tool pulls from anything it can reach, with no way of knowing which version of a “fact” is correct.

When information on the internet doesn’t match information in real life — for example, the closed restaurant whose AI-powered phone operator insisted was open, the dinner restaurant that AI insisted was open for brunch — customers are underserved. Tech-savvy diners might know to blame the bots; others just blame the restaurant. At the same time, big tech companies say they want to be true partners, maybe even advocates, for their restaurant clients. Becoming their verifiable system of record and source of truth — by technical standards and also practical ones — carries serious weight.

And in a tech era defined by rapidly evolving AI and a growing list of integrations that determine the way a restaurant’s information shows up inside search engines and search agents and chatbots and social media listings and online map pins… it’s good to be the authority.

We all — me, a journalist, Claude, a chatbot, et al. — need access to good data to produce good work. Unfortunately, as we’ve learned, garbage in equals garbage out. A good result is only as good as its source of truth, served by its system of record.

Earning that status is the closest the major players in a fragmented industry can get to winner-take-all. And behind this battle in the reservation wars is a much simpler squabble: the fight over who gets to be right.

I talked to Adam on my podcast, The Simmer, about the book and — most importantly to readers of this newsletter — the one thing he really wants restaurant tech execs to know. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or right here:

OpenTable released its ‘largest suite of new and updated product features for restaurants’ last week.

I’ve got beef. So does Wonder.

Six months after buying single-location fried chicken concept Blue Ribbon Fried Chicken, the ghost kitchen / food hall / fast food / delivery / meal kit company last valued at $9 billion bought another NYC restaurant. It’s acquiring New York City’s Salt Hanks, a wildly popular single-location sandwich shop with a viral french dip sandwich. The sandwich will be available at some Wonder locations beginning this fall.

“The sandwich that’s always been worth the wait is about to become a lot easier to get,” a company release declared.

That’s true. But I’m hung up on the rest of the language Wonder used in the announcement, which — unlike the Blue Ribbon announcement or subsequent coverage of Wonder’s acquisition of an eight-unit barbecue chain — doesn’t contain the word “acquired,” “bought,” or even “purchased.” Instead, the company softens the language: “Salt Hank’s joins Wonder,” it says. “The partnership is built on a shared belief that exceptional restaurants shouldn’t have to sacrifice what makes them special in order to reach more people.”

ETA: The word “acquisition” does appear in the official release, but not in a shortened version that was emailed to me yesterday. I don’t remember seeing it then, but it’s also been a real challenge of a week. Regardless, it’s in there now, and if I did miss it, I regret the oversight.

This is true, too! But it understates what’s actually happening. The restaurant, its branding, its menu, its recipes (Wonder calls this IP) have been sold. Chef Daniel Rubenfeld will join Wonder, while co-founder Henry Laporte — Hank — will “partner closely.”

(I asked a Wonder rep to clarify the announcement, and they confirmed it is an acquisition — Eater’s Nadia Chauduhury got it right in her Thursday coverage shortly after the announcement.)

Wonder has a lot of irons in the fire — it owns a meal kit service and a third-party delivery company; it’s expanding locations fast in the Northeast and in Texas, where it’ll soon start delivering by airborne drone. It’s teased a kind of build-your-own restaurant concept for influencers (or anyone that wants to spin up their own AI-generated restaurant concept in a couple minutes) — the robot it bought from Sweetgreen will help assemble the meals. It is, to put it lightly, a moonshot with a lot — a lot — of money behind it.

So what does it want with a single-location sandwich spot? Scale.

“Customers can expect the same iconic French Dip — made with dry-aged prime rib, caramelized onions, melted provolone, horseradish aioli, rich hot au jus and served on a French demi baguette — but without the long lines,” Wonder promises.

In an interview with People (what?) which also avoided words like “acquired” or “bought,” Laporte explained that he trusted Wonder to scale the concept appropriately. “...they don’t wanna f--- up the sandwich,” he said.

I’ve done a lot of reporting on this company, including talking to chefs with notable brands that have worked with Wonder. Some of those deals were partnerships; chefs reported receiving favorable deals that allowed them to walk away at any time. Not all have stayed on, but at the time of our interviews, all of them spoke highly of the company, its leadership, and its commitment to scaling while maintaining food quality.

Still, I’m not convinced that even the most meticulous reconstruction of an iconic, viral sandwich can replicate the original. Will it taste as good if you don’t have to fight as hard to get it? What happens to the magic of an indie business when its essence (and IP!) is taken over by a highly capitalized corporation? We’ll see, I guess. But I hope everyone feels like they got a great deal.

“I’m happy to be able to finally answer those DMs that are like, ‘Why the f--- can’t I get this sandwich!’” Laporte told People. “And now I’ll be like, ‘You can!’ You know, to a certain degree.”

OpenTable is putting influencer videos inside restaurant listings.

OpenTable is adding influencer videos to listings across the country in partnership with a SF-based startup called Seekeasy, an analytics company that pairs restaurants and digital creators. (It calls itself “the demand intelligence layer for the food industry.”)

Influence is hard to prove, but diners do care about social media aesthetics. According to OpenTable’s 2026 dining trends report, well over half of diners age 60 and under (including 79 percent of millennials) said a restaurant’s “Instagram/TikTok worthiness” is important when making a decision about where to dine.

“Creators bring the restaurant experience to life,” Seekeasy CEO Erick Hachenburg told me. “Diners can now quickly use their relatable stories to make decisions and enjoy the experience themselves.”

Diners are more open to AI now, according to a survey from PAR Technology, a point of sale company.

In PAR’s survey of 1,000 customers last year, 41 percent said they would choose a restaurant with no AI over a restaurant that uses AI in any form. This year? Just 27 percent said the same thing, signaling that 3 in 4 diners don’t mind when a restaurant uses the tech. Progress?

ICYMI:

The two San Francisco-founded companies first partnered in 2022 and have already connected reservations and point of sale data for restaurants. Today, they promise “deeper insights sharing… to address the restaurant pain point of disconnected systems,” per a press release.

“We believe in a seamless ecosystem and we believe in giving operators the best products we can so that it’s actually seamless,” James Schonzeit, head of food and beverage at Square, told me during an interview this week.

“The opportunity is bigger than simply connecting two systems,” said Robin Chiang, chief growth officer at OpenTable, over email. “Because OpenTable and Square’s engineering teams built the integration directly, the platforms communicate bi-directionally in real time — giving restaurants one continuous view of the guest from booking and arrival through ordering, payment and future visits.”

This might sound familiar.

That’s because top competitors to OpenTable and Square just rolled out a similar integration. Reservations service Resy and point of sale platform Toast announced a major partnership last year. Last week, they debuted (long awaited) Resy-powered digital chits — notes and info about a diner — to Toast handhelds.

Bookings are back in the discourse after a recent Wall Street Journal piece lamenting the state of the business “Reservation apps have made getting into a restaurant a nightmare,” its headline dramatically declared. “Nightmare” is a strong word for what’s happening to reservations — even in New York, considered the epicenter of reservations mania thanks to its density and probably its status as the onetime walk-in capital of America (as anyone who’s experienced a bit of NYC restaurant serendipity will tell you, this writer included).

But it is true that an increasing number of partnerships, arrangements, exclusive events, and status-driven access allow technology companies and their credit card benefactors to broker the relationship between restaurant and diner. Now additional info — data on customer spend, payment methods, visit history, and more — is creeping into in the (very visible) mix.

“Reservations, payments, and guest data shouldn’t be different systems that restaurant operators have to stitch together themselves,” Square’s Schonzeit said in a release. “No one has time for that, and we’re not in the business of gatekeeping their most valuable insights.”

After a tumultuous few months, Square is once again highlighting its capabilities at full-service restaurants.

A deal with the country’s top reservations platform brings Square serious visibility. It’s now OpenTable’s preferred point of sale partner.

“We expect this collaboration will accelerate our customer acquisition efforts,” execs wrote of the deal in Square’s August letter to shareholders.

Last February, Square parent company Block laid off half of its workforce, some 4,000 workers including its then-head of restaurants and much of his team. Just hours after employees received notice that their roles had been cut, Block’s executives extolled Square’s progress inside restaurants in the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call, flagging a year-over-year increase in gross payment volume — total transaction value — at restaurants and other food-service vendors using Square’s point of sale.

Six months later, gross payment volume from restaurants and other food businesses on Square is up again, this time 20 percent year over year. GPV in the US accelerated to its strongest growth rate since early 2023.

Square got its start with small, independent businesses and still thrives in places like coffee shops and food trucks. But it’s expanding fast. Earlier this year, it added a new drive-thru product, targeting multi-location quick service restaurants. In Block’s early August earnings call, chief financial officer Amrita Ahuja called “mid-markets” — businesses processing over $500,000 through Square annually — the company’s “fastest ramping segment,” growing over 20 percent.

This makes it a great time to highlight the company’s ability to serve full-service restaurants — and their guests. And the companies promise there’s more to come from its OpenTable deal: “Future enhancements,” Square’s press release promises, “will focus on faster onboarding, smarter reservation workflows, richer guest intelligence across every ordering channel, and deeper integration of loyalty, customer engagement, and payment experiences.”

Last week, one of my San Francisco favorites announced an alt funding platform of its own. Pasta Supply Co., helmed by chef Anthony Strong, announced plans to open its third pasta shop-slash-restaurant, selling and serving seriously great pasta — bucatini, egg malfaldine, chicken-prosciutto tortelli — in local neighborhoods.

To raise money to build out the space, an under 1,000-square-foot former Peet’s Coffee shop in Cole Valley near the Haight, Strong instituted a crowdfunding campaign: area “investors” who pay $550 upfront get free pasta — a package that’ll feed two adults, at least — every week for the next year. Those who give $4,000 get pasta for life. (Important fine print: “Non-transferrable, even in the event of mortal termination.”) A few hours in, the campaign was already a quarter of the way to Strong’s initial funding goal.

Pasta Supply Co. previously ran crowdfunding campaigns using Kickstarter. Now, with a following of very satisfied customers (this writer and her butter-noodle obsessed children included), Strong decided to circumvent platform fees and go direct. People sign up for the pasta plans via the store’s Square storefront. (This also makes the funding transactional, clarifying everyone’s role. “We’ve had some ick moments over the years,” Strong told me.)

To manage all the subscriptions, Strong vibe-coded a customer tracker using Claude Code. Patrons are photographed when picking up their first pasta order and get one “skipsie” per month. The tracker pulls data from the point of sale system, tracking trends over time — including a particularly San Francisco phenom:

“We can see how many people skipped Burning Man week,” Strong said.

UPDATE:

A year after announcing an extended partnership, Resy and Toast are finally rolling out a huge part of the deal’s promise: digital chits. That means diner info from Resy’s guest book — guest notes, visit history, special occasions — will show up on Toast screens for servers.

ICYMI:

In the nearly decade-and-a-half between its launch and last year’s acquisition announcement, SevenRooms grew into a reservations and customer relationship management powerhouse. It grew fast inside restaurants but also inside hotels and casinos and in strategic international locations like London and Dubai and Australia.

By the time DoorDash showed up with a $1.2 billion offer, SevenRooms was working with 13,000 venues around the world. “It’s about adding to our platform business,” DoorDash CEO Tony Xu said of the deal at the time, which, according to my recent interview with SevenRooms’ top exec, has proven true.

Joel Montaniel, a SevenRooms co-founder and its founding CEO, still leads the company from within its parent org. Until this conversation, we hadn’t spoken since the acquisition announcement. He couldn’t say much about the future then; the deal wasn’t closed, the companies couldn’t strategize yet. (He was also still trying to return the barrage of text messages one receives after announcing a billion-dollar exit.)

This week, I finally got to host Joel on my podcast, The Simmer. It was an overdue conversation, but I’m glad we waited. Nearly a year since the DoorDash acquisition closed, he’s able to talk about it and the products and initiatives that the once-unlikely partnership has spawned. (I know at least one that has the competition a little rattled, more on that below.)

This episode of The Simmer is available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Paid subscribers can keep reading for highlights from my interview with Montaniel. Quotes have been edited for length and clarity, but I captured the last line — my favorite — exactly as he said it.

On SevenRooms’ decision to go after hotels and casinos as early clients:

“We didn't think that the world needed another reservation system. What we thought was missing was customer data and a system to help the restaurant manage their customers, understand their customers, and then make that data available at their fingertips. So when Kristen walks in, it's not that she has a reservation, it’s that she's a regular of ours. She's friends with the owner, and she happens to have a reservation.

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Starting today, diners (and drinkers) will find Tock’s 8,000 venues, including 1,200 wineries, inside the Resy app. It’s the first in a multi-step process that’ll sunset the Tock brand. Resy says the move will give Tock’s restaurants more visibility. It also boosts Resy’s venue count to 25,000.

This is just the first step in a much longer process that will end with Tock’s sunset. But the brand (and its app) is still alive for now; diners will still see their Resy reservations listed in their Resy accounts and Tock reservations in Tock accounts.

(I am told by the people who are doing it that combining the backend technology of two disparate platforms is far more complicated than flipping a one-time switch. They also say that Resy and Tock user accounts will be linked soon and that all bookings on the Amex-owned services, regardless of how or where the booking was made, will live inside Resy.)

Expect more consolidation soon. Starting in mid-September, “hundreds” of Tock venues in major US markets will qualify for the popular Resy dining credit attached to some American Express cards. More will roll out over time. (Again, a complex tech move.) For now, diners can confirm a particular restaurant is eligible for the credit on its venue page.

Alt financing platform InKind gets another $414 million.

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During Tuesday’s second-quarter earnings call, Toast CEO Aman Narang explained how the data his company collects — lots and lots of restaurant data thanks to the hard work of humans that work inside tens of thousands of restaurants — will help Toast build and sell AI-powered tools that know better than all of us.

The company launched its first AI-powered agent as part of a marketing product, called Toast IQ Grow, in May. The $499 per month add-on for Toast customers promises to drive business through personalized efforts led by AI but with additional human support to create and execute custom and marketing campaigns.

“We’re leveraging data and learning across 150,000-plus customers,” he said, learning what makes a successful ad campaign or a good online ordering website; understanding how restaurants function during busy times and slow times, and analyzing guest behavior and preferences.

Then Toast, which launched as a restaurant point of sale system 14 years ago but plans to evolve into an agentic toolset for businesses, uses that information to determine and execute the best, most optimized, most-likely-to-succeed action.

“That’s what’s really allowing us to build a platform where it’s actually outperforming what humans can do,” Narang said.

It’s catching on.

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Last month, Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram at Meta, explained a new Threads update that changed the way the Instagram-adjacent, text-based social media service surfaces posts to its 500 million monthly active users. Meta tweaked its algorithm, Mosseri said, to give us more control over the topics in our feeds.

In a Threads post, Mosseri wrote:

“It surfaces the topics the system thinks you’re most interested in — you can see them, add ones you want more of, and remove ones you don’t. Your Algorithm is live across Reels, Explore, and as of this week, Feed. Topics are only the start; we’re actively working on supporting requests for people, different moods or vibes, content types, and more.”

In other words, help us help you.

I noticed a shift in my personal Threads feed around the same time. I’ve never talked directly to the feed, offered a “Dear algo…” when prompted, or adjusted topics I want to surface. Still, the algo found me, a longtime restaurant technology reporter, and for the first time served up a bunch of normal diners sharing disappointing tech-infused dining experiences.

Friends, I love it here.

To be clear: I appreciate seeing real-life evidence of restaurant technology shortcomings. I do not love that these people are having bad experiences at and adjacent to restaurants and I sincerely hope they were, and continue to be, rectified.

Still, it shows that, increasingly, diners can tell the difference between a restaurant’s misstep and a blunder by a tech company that supports a restaurant — maybe due to waning trust in tech companies overall.

New poll data from Gallup released earlier this month found that Americans’ confidence in the country’s big tech companies has dropped to a record low; just 20 percent say they trust tech a great deal. (41 percent admitted little to no confidence.) That’s a continued slide from roughly third of Americans that said they trusted big tech when Gallup started asking the question in 2020.

I’ve written before about restaurants and diners getting caught in the crosshairs as tech iterates and “innovates.” (For example: the chaotic case of the misreported brunch service thanks to Google’s AI.) Hopefully leaders of these companies are paying attention.

Anyway! Here’s a peek of some recent algorithmic gems from my personal Threads feed:

1. The voice AI misfire:

Judging only by the details in this thread, a small error — incorrect hours listed on a Yelp page — snowballed into a fully confident and believable voice AI agent misguiding a would-be diner and her family.

2. The diner-facing surcharge:

Payments app Sunday, which restaurants use to help diners split the bill and pay, charges restaurants to use its platform. But it also charges diners a small “platform fee” that some say is not properly disclosed. At least one proposed class action lawsuit agrees. (Anecdotally, an operator whose restaurant uses Sunday once told me that they refund this charge at the diner’s request.)

The tech company’s terms of service, updated earlier this year, say, “Merchant can decide whether to charge the Users for all or part of the Platform Fee. Merchant understands that it will be responsible for paying to Sunday any Platform Fee or any part of the Platform Fee not paid by the Users.”

Diners, understandably, really don’t like extra fees. I don’t think restaurants do either; remember when point of sale system Toast proposed a diner-facing charge and its restaurant customers revolted? The company quickly walked back its plans to charge diners and acknowledged the mistake.

3. The survey hound:

I don’t like these surveys either, but whatever third-party service this restaurant used (I have no idea which one it is) should probably chill out on the comms. Bullying a diner into sharing a review can’t possibly net high-quality feedback.

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 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.”