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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“Tock is stronger today than when I arrived, and more importantly, better positioned to serve you, your teams, and your guests,” he assured restaurant partners in his email.

His departure comes just months after American Express announced it would sunset Tock. It’s folding the brand and its tech into Resy, the company’s larger booking platform, in what’s been a long process that will take a couple months more to complete. Tucker planned to leave Tock around the time of that announcement, he told restaurants in his email, but wrote he “enjoyed working with the Tock team and our colleagues at Resy so much that I decided to stay a few extra months.”

(This line made me laugh, mostly because Tucker responded directly to my February Tock-is-sunsetting scoop with: “You just lit up my phone with ‘When are you leaving?’ texts.” Sorry! But I have been impressed by the genuine rapport between the leaders of two former competitors unified under one parent company.)

“It has been a real privilege having Matt on the team the last two years,” Pablo Rivero, CEO of Resy and Tock and SVP of American Express Global Dining said over email. (See?)

“He has been critical in bringing Tock into Resy and American Express, helping to lay the foundation for the future of our business. From our first meeting, it was clear that we share the perspective that Resy and Tock are incredibly compatible, not only in the product, but in their intentions and cultures. He brought with him a phenomenal team of people who are passionate about this industry, and I’m grateful for having the opportunity to learn from him. We’ll truly miss him and are all grateful for his leadership and impact.”

Tucker was the second leader of Tock, a reservations service founded in 2014 as a restaurant ticketing platform. He took over from Nick Kokonas, Tock’s founder and CEO, who sold the company to website provider Squarespace in 2021 for $400 million in what remains the most spectacular deal to come out of the Covid-era restaurant technology acquisition spree. Tucker joined Squarespace as head of Tock in 2022 and led its $400 million sale to American Express two years later, a move he considers crucial to securing Tock’s legacy.

“I’m very lucky I did that deal,” Tucker told me on Monday, implying Tock wouldn’t have been as powerful a competitor in today’s high-stakes reservations wars1 without the deep-pocketed backing of a financial services giant.

That’s because the reservations industry has changed — dramatically! — even in the relatively short time Amex has owned Tock. Its top players now court brand-aware and increasingly tech-savvy restaurants, sometimes writing big checks to win their business. DoorDash’s $1.2 billion acquisition of reservations platform SevenRooms last year and the delivery company’s subsequent flashy foray into restaurant bookings — signing some rumored top-dollar checks of its own — shook up industry leaders in a way I hadn’t seen before.

“I don’t know if an incredibly innovative, pure-play reservations company like Tock could launch today and compete in this world,” Tucker said. “I think that would be impossible. The economic model is not survivable as a pure technology SaaS business at all.”

While there’s no longer a need for a “head of Tock” at American Express, Tucker expects the company to replace him in his role as chief commercial officer. After taking some time off, he expects to return to the restaurant tech industry. (Before Tock, Tucker spent over eight years at online ordering giant Olo, serving as its president and chief operating officer during the company’s 2021 IPO.)

He is certain about one thing: “I can assure you I’m not going to start a reservations business,” Tucker said. But he might take advantage of the industry’s evolution, which now includes rumored seven-figure paydays for a handful of the country’s top spots. “Maybe now I’ll go and be an agent for chefs and restaurants,” he said.

Tock, historically:

The restaurant point of sale and payments company stuck its ads to windows of eight New York businesses, including Carmine’s in Times Square, H&H Bagels further uptown, and Radio Bakery in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Front windows are prime real estate, so I was surprised — at first — to learn Toast had pulled it off.

But, Ben Howell, partner and director of operations at Radio Bakery, told me, “The ask was a pretty small lift.” The ad was up for about 36 hours, he said; Toast put it up after service one day and spent the next day capturing photos and time-lapse videos of the restaurant’s exterior. Then they took it down.

The Radio Bakery ad was part of a “built for busy” marketing campaign from the tech company, highlighting high-traffic, popular businesses and celebrating their success. “800 croissants a day,” the ad in the window said, “That’s how Radio Bakery does busy.”

“We weren’t concerned about how it would affect us or the space or the aesthetic,” Howell said. That’s probably because it was so short-lived.

“If it was going to be up for like a month … we would’ve asked for an astronomical amount of money,” he added.

Participating restaurants were compensated for their participation, Toast confirmed. Howell wouldn’t say on the record how much the company paid the bakery to briefly host the ad, nor what amount of money counts as “astronomical” in this scenario (though we’ve all heard some things).

“Operators who participated told us they were proud to be involved,” Kelly Esten, Toast’s chief marketer said over email.

Howell concurs. Plus, he said, “Being in a Toast ad is also advertising us.”

The ads have been down for a couple of weeks, but expect images and video from the campaign to show up all year across Toast’s digital channels and through partnerships with New York-based content creators. Toast complemented the windows with a weeklong sponsorship of Caper, the new, New York-based business-of-restaurants newsletter that over the last week has covered knife-sharpening truck and a shuttered Brooklyn bakery and industry awards drama and, most interestingly to this lapsed Catholic, a private club in Manhattan that hired priests to take confession during opening hours.

Toast doesn’t have plans to advertise at more restaurants in New York or elsewhere, though a rep for the company said they received positive feedback and “are thinking about that as we plan our next steps for the brand.”

I’d expect more like this.

“Something we didn’t fully anticipate? Operators who weren’t part of it started asking if they could get a window, too,” Toast’s Esten said.

My message to Toast restaurants: know your worth! The $17 billion tech company reports first-quarter earnings later this week.

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HAGS, a small restaurant in New York, has long done things differently. It started as a Covid-era pop-up, experimenting with structure and pricing, before eventually opening as an East Village brick-and-mortar with a tasting menu. It serves that menu four nights per week, but on Sundays offers something unusual: a pay-what-you-can brunch service that co-owner and executive chef Telly Justice says roots the restaurant in its relationship with its community. The Sunday a la carte menu suggests prices for each dish, but guests are invited to pay what they can for the food — even if that’s nothing at all.

Recently, Justice has taken the pay-what-you-can concept on the road. After successful collabs with restaurants including Post Haste in Philadelphia and Acamaya in New Orleans, HAGS recently announced a few more, including a (successful!) pay-what-you-can March dinner at Madeira Park in Atlanta, and, next month, another at Joodooboo in Oakland, California.

A delicious and affordable meal is obviously great for a diner, especially for one that might not experience the restaurant otherwise. But as Justice explained, it’s also a great opportunity for restaurant workers.

“Every time I get the opportunity to do this with another restaurant or expose another chef to what it’s like to cook for somebody when you take away the pressure of transaction, it’s like watching a little kid interact with a new toy… there’s a light in their eyes,” Justice told me. “It’s like they’re remembering why they cook.”

Justice is right — I’ve sat through more than my fair share of restaurant and hospitality events where a string of speakers sells the audience on the benefits of serving others. It feels great! But good feels don’t always translate to a good bottom line. For HAGS, though, it has… just maybe not in the way you’d expect.

In a recent interview, Justice talked me through the economics of it all, including the unexpected delights of taking the transaction out of a restaurant meal. Restaurants are about food, but they’re also about human connection. Justice’s restaurant — and many restaurants — can pull this off, she said, when they build trust over time.

“If you were to retroactively insert this into your business model,” she said, “I think you’d look at the numbers and feel disappointed. But… are you losing money in the long run? Are you losing money over the course of five to 10 years? If you’re building community around your restaurant and you stay relevant in ways that other restaurants can’t — and can’t compete with — what’s the return on that loss?”

This is a long interview; it was too good to cut. Paid subscribers can read the full conversation below. (I really like the part about front-of-house staff at the end!)

As always, our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Expedite: How did this pay-what-you-can project get its start?

Telly Justice, HAGS: “Our relationship to pay-what-you-can started a long time ago. Before I was a professional chef, I was working with food advocacy groups. I got involved distributing food to people in need at a young age, and that was essential to my coming to the industry and becoming a trained chef.

“As I moved through the ranks — and as my business partner, Camille [Lindsley, the restaurant’s wine director] moved through the ranks — of fine dining restaurants, we slowly felt ourselves like being pulled away from the core elements of why we loved to cook and to host and provide hospitality. We were doing it for technical and ambition reasons, but we were farther separated from the care that felt essential to us when we were younger.

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The government is scrutinizing delivery apps again. For the next month, the Federal Trade Commission is seeking public comment on a proposal that it says could prevent unfair and deceptive practices in food and grocery delivery. The consumer protection org wants people to weigh in on delivery charges, variable and contingent fees, and personalized (read: variable) pricing inside popular food and grocery delivery apps.

The delivery companies get grumpy when the government pokes around or attempts to regulate their business; that’s assured. But there’s one facet of the FTC’s proposal that’s going to reignite an old argument: Should restaurants charge more for menu items on third-party platforms?

Restaurants do this and platforms allow it. A restaurant’s position is clear: they paying a premium to sell menu items through the apps, so diners should pay a premium for the convenience of accessing them. Elevated prices help restaurants absorb commissions the platforms charge.

Now, the FTC seems concerned that these differences in price could be deceptive, spotlighting one of the few bits of leverage restaurants have on platforms that are otherwise largely outside of their control. In its call for public comment, the FTC asks:

“Do online food delivery platforms clearly and conspicuously disclose whether the prices of items ordered are the same as, or different from, the prices of the same items offered in the store or restaurant?”

To be clear: the FTC isn’t coming for restaurants’ pricing power. But they might be coming for platform-level disclosures that would highlight the sort of pricing discrepancies that’ll anger the apps. Think about it: If large apps are forced to “clearly and conspicuously” disclose that the same menu items are available for less money elsewhere — whether in-person at a restaurant or on a rival app or platform — they could lose business.

In the past, DoorDash (for example) has encouraged but not required restaurants to keep app prices close to in-store prices. In 2023, the company said so-called “significant discrepancies” in menu prices can result in a significant sales decline for restaurants, including a 78 percent reduction in reorder rates from customers. Inflated prices are among the top complaints from diners who order on the platform, they added.

Restaurants want (some) regulation.

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DoorDash’s White House stunt kinda backfired.

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This look at the future of hospitality is sponsored by Square.

In my work on my series, Counter Trends, for The Bottom Line by Square, I’ve talked to a lot of restaurant operators. But few are as personally inspiring as the women I recently spoke to — Molly Moon-Neitzel from Molly Moon’s Ice Cream in Seattle and Arshiya Farheen from Verzênay bakery in Chicago — who have built thriving values-driven businesses that are doing great while also doing good.

Each approaches their business with genuine care. Moon-Neitzel told stories about cherries picked by local preschool children that she used in her first batches of cherry-chunk ice cream (she eventually had to graduate to a larger, but still local supplier). And Farheen described clearly why hiring a female kitchen staff — most of whom are mothers and caretakers outside of work — has benefitted her pastry business. It’s not easy — both women spoke of the uncomfortable trade-offs required to stick to their values while working to turn a profit — but it’s clearly rewarding.

It’s also refreshing to me, a business journalist, to hear stories of success tied to leaning on strong values like supporting women and local farmers and a local community, knowing that good business doesn’t have to come at the expense of being a good human.

Molly Moon-Neitzel, an outspoken community activist, started her 11-location ice cream empire as a kind of experiment. After years of running a political non-profit, she was curious if she could also run a for-profit business that aligned with her values. The answer, almost two decades later, is: most definitely yes. When we talked late last year, the business was on track to pass $15 million in annual sales, including its retail stores and presence in 150 local grocery stores.

Identifying and sticking to strong beliefs and values — values like care and community that transcend polarizing culture and politics — is critical to Molly Moon’s success, she told me. (Speaking of polarizing, you should read the full story to fully absorb Moon-Neitzel’s fiery passion for her extra-salty salted caramel recipe!)

“I was loud about my values, and people would come in and tell me that they shared my values,” Moon-Neitzel said. “I was in community from the beginning.”

In Chicago, chef Arshiya Farheen started Verzênay after spending years in Paris training, then working, in prestigious French kitchens inside hotel Le Meurice and patisserie Arnaud Delmontel. She loved the rigor of the kitchens, the precision, the discipline, the pursuit of excellence, she told me.

“But,” she said, “I was often one of very few women in the room. And while no one explicitly told me I didn’t belong, there were subtle messages about endurance, about commitment, about who was ‘cut out’ for this life.”

That experience inspired her bakery’s operational structure today. She launched Verzênay as a stand inside a farmers’ market in 2014 and moved to a brick-and-mortar location seven years later. Most of the people who work inside its kitchen are women.

“I didn’t sit down and say, ‘I’m building a female kitchen,’” she said. Instead, she built the kind of kitchen she wanted to work inside. “Over time, that intention shaped the team naturally.”

It’s also led to great results: low turnover, high-quality customer service, and consistent product quality. Or, in Farheen’s words, “deep loyalty, care, and investment.”

“When someone feels safe and respected, they don’t just clock in and clock out,” she added. “They care about the details. They protect the standards, they protect each other.”

We hadn’t discussed much about her plans for growth or expansion, though in a separate interview, her husband told me Verzenay was expanding into catering and also nationwide shipping, selling cookies, jams, jellies, preserves, and gorgeous packaged bonbons to customers outside of Chicago.

“Our growth hasn’t been explosive for the sake of expansion. It’s been steady, rooted. And I believe that’s because the foundation is strong. When you build with intention, growth becomes sustainable not just financially, but culturally. For me, that’s success.”

Beli’s big difference is its methodical data collection and analysis, gathered while encouraging people to dine out. It invites users — restaurant-goers — to tap the app to keep track of where they’ve been, where they want to go, what they like, and more. But not too much. In fact, Thelen says, “If people are spending too much time on the app, we’re not doing our job.”

That’s an unconventional position for an app founder in an ecosystem that usually rewards time spent with a product or service. So unconventional, in fact, that Beli didn’t take outside investment until it proved its own thesis — that it could collect and analyze info about diner behavior without requiring a heavy lift from its users. Then, Thelen told me, investors more easily understood why time spent on the app wasn’t the best metric to understand its success.

I learned all of this during an onstage interview last week at the Boston University Hospitality Leadership Summit, which we recorded and released this week as the inaugural live episode of my podcast, the Simmer. I’ve wanted to talk to Thelen for a while — and I’ve tried! — but her company has also eschewed traditional press in service of quietly building what Thelen hopes will become “the largest repository of preference data in the world.”

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I know it’s going to be a good newsletter day when an interview subject says: “So this is kind of controversial, but I think it’s going to be good.”

Alex Sambvani is co-founder and CEO of Slang, a voice AI platform for restaurants that announced a $36 million Series B funding round in late February. The raise brings Slang’s total funding to $68 million and, per Sambvani, will fund more development, more product features, and more insights for restaurants.

Slang got its start answering the phone at restaurants; voice AI to free up a host inside a restaurant, answering the phone and offering guests (and potential guests) fast answers to common — and even not-so-common — questions. It now does this for over 2,000 restaurants, fielding over 25 million phone calls and counting. Slang integrates with platforms including OpenTable and SevenRooms with more to come [👀]; guests can initiate a reservation over the phone, and Slang will tap real-time availability to book the table and confirm via voice and text message.

Anyway, back to the potential controversy: a feature called host insights:

“We are starting to record and monitor host-to-guest communications using AI, Sambvani explained.

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Bilt Hospitality launched just as I arrived in Philadelphia for a work event last weekend. Bilt, a loyalty and payments company, announced its new restaurant-focused loyalty and experience play with a slick, five-minute video featuring 21 top chefs and restaurateurs. Twenty of the video’s stars are men; just one is a woman, restaurateur Elizabeth Blau, 16th in line.

A few people at the restaurant industry conference I attended in Philly mentioned the video — to be honest, more people clocked the lack of gender diversity than the message — and we collectively had more questions than answers.

Thankfully, Sam Bakhshandehpour, Bilt’s new president of local merchants and former CEO of Jose Andres Group, offered to explain it all to me (and my podcast co-host Brandon) late last week.

“These are all longtime friends and partners,” he told us during Friday’s interview, “these are all people that are leaders in our industry.”

It’s a simple premise, Bakhshandehpour continued: “How do we connect all the various touch points to our guests and go back to the essence of hospitality, which is owning the relationship and enhancing the guest experience?”

Bilt Hospitality calls itself an “orchestration platform” for good service at restaurants, funneling diners into seats via AI-powered “neighborhood concierges” and handing operators AI tools to help them create, extend, and facilitate the kind of extra-special moments every top restaurant name loves to share. It’s all built on Bilt’s core business: offering people points for paying their rent or mortgage. But the hospitality of it all has Bakhshandehpour talking about disjointed restaurant systems and seamless guest experiences — common tropes in restaurant technology.

So… what is it, exactly?

Bilt Hospitality sounds flashy — a restaurant tech product backed by a hot finance startup worth $10 billion (at the time of its last announced fundraise) — but the premise is actually pretty simple.

“Everything that Bilt is able to help a restaurant do, restaurants can already do,” restaurateur Will Guidara, onetime co-owner of Eleven Madison Park and author of modern hospitality volume Unreasonable Hospitality, said in Bilt’s launch video. “Bilt just makes it easier to do these things with more consistency for more people.”

Chefs and restaurateurs get it, Bakhshandehpour told me. They may not understand the particularities of how, exactly, the technology works to connect the dots between disparate systems, but they do understand the end result: better service.

In other words, if you’re lauded restaurateur Danny Meyer in Bilt’s launch video: “To think that hospitality can be anything other than ‘one-size-fits-one’ is a big mistake.”

Bilt launched as a loyalty platform in 2019, but found its real niche a few years later when it launched a credit card — the Bilt Rewards Mastercard — that offered cardholders points in exchange for their biggest expense: rent. It evolved to a payment platform that covers a quarter of the U.S. “multifamily rental” market. (I pulled all these details from a great 2025 Fast Company story about Bilt that also uses the term “points-based economy” which I both love and loathe.)

It has tremendous reach. During our interview, Bakhshandehpour told me that 6 million rental residences are connected to Bilt; it’ll soon add 5 million mortgages. This cohort is forecasted to spend $20 billion “in the neighborhood,” he said — meaning Bilt knows a lot about people, including where they live and, roughly as determined by the size of their housing bill, the kind of restaurant they might frequent.

Here’s more about what I learned from our conversation last week, which you can listen to in full on The Simmer. And if you, like me, are still wondering where all the women went, Bakhshandehpour told me twice to “stay tuned” for more content from Bilt Hospitality, including product-specific videos.

“You’ll be the first to know,” he promised.

Bilt Hospitality operates on a commission structure.

We had to ask twice to get this answer: Bilt Hospitality makes money via commissions and, presumably, incremental diners who wouldn’t have otherwise visited a restaurant. Bakhshandehpour didn’t offer more details, but did promise relevance.

“We’re delivering the right guests to merchants,” he said. “We’re targeting exactly the right type of guest and customer that they want. That’s where this commission structure comes from.”

Its networks start with housing.

You don’t have to live in a Bilt building or even be a Bilt Mastercard holder to be a Bilt member. But it definitely helps.

“No one owns housing,” Bakhshandehpour said during our interview, a sentiment that, taken out of context, sounds strange. But what he means (I think!) is that housing — rents, landlords, owners, mortgages — is inherently disjointed. But if Bilt can attach itself to a household’s greatest expense

“To own the neighborhood, you need to own dining,” he said. “The dining experience defines your neighborhood.”

The restaurant-specific stuff is powered by an AI concierge.

On the diner side, members can ask for recommendations and take action. Bakhshandehpour recounted a recent experience: “I told the AI I have a lunch interview on this date. Find me a restaurant near the offices in [New York’s] Meatpacking that is quieter yet has a warm and inviting vibe so I can actually speak. It recommended Frenchette at the Whitney and it said, Oh, by the way, Frenchette is not a Bilt restaurant partner. Here’s an OpenTable link for you to go make the reservation. I made the reservation, show up, table’s waiting.”

Restaurant operators can use the tech, too. “With the hit of a couple buttons, you can take care of 16 guests in five minutes,” Chicago restaurateur Kevin Boehm said on Bilt’s video.

It’s unclear exactly which “buttons” Boehm is talking about — but Bakhshandehpour explained: “From Kevin’s vantage point, he sits back and plays armchair hospitality — I think that was a phrase he actually used when we hung out. He can say, ‘Who are my key people coming in tonight? Oh, Kristen and Brandon are coming in. Awesome. Make sure that Chef touches the table and that we send them dessert from me. And here’s the note, I would like it to say, Why did you give me such a hard time on your podcast?1’ Boom. Now for Kevin to have done that previously, he would have to call or text the GM, relay that. Then they would have to relay that to the manager on the floor. Somewhere along the line, the odds are high that the manual process would break.”

🎧 Listen to our full interview on The Simmer:

Listen on Spotify

Listen on Apple Podcasts