What this usually means is that a big story will break and I will not cover it, so I’m offering a preemptive you’re welcome! to any and all Expedite competiti…

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I reached out to Huh, but he declined to comment. I have also reached out to reps for Square with questions about the future of Square for Restaurants and what businesses can expect from the company moving forward.

Update, 3/2/26: Huh confirmed this news on LinkedIn. Block did not respond or acknowledge receipt of my questions.

Corporate earnings calls can sound discordant in the face of historic layoffs, and Thursday’s Block call was one of the worst I’ve heard. Block CEO Jack Dorsey announced the company had laid off close to half of its employees, reducing headcount from 10,000 to under 6,000. The company’s stock price quickly jumped close to 25 percent as Block’s executives reported a year of growth. Dorsey assured investors that he had gotten ahead of a potential problem and some analysts congratulated company execs on the company’s recent performance.

Dorsey and other execs cited rapidly evolving and powerful artificial intelligence as the reason for the layoffs; he seemed particularly excited to push the suddenly much smaller company to move (and ship) faster. I can understand how AI might trim a company’s tech and engineering org. I understand less about how it’s going to replace the people working on Square’s restaurant products that lost their jobs this week. (From what I’ve heard so far, the layoffs cut across functions.)

During the call, Block’s leadership extolled Square’s progress inside restaurants, flagging a year-over-year increase in gross payment volume, or the total dollar amount of all payments processed by restaurants and other food-service vendors using Square’s point of sale. Block wants to “bring the playbook we’ve used over in food and beverage in the last 12 to 18 months into other verticals to drive further strength,” Amrita Ahuja, Block chief operating officer/chief financial officer, said.

Square has supported food and restaurant entrepreneurs since its earliest days as a payments company. It has long celebrated restaurant wins. Even in the face of a historic workforce reduction, good restaurant news made it into yesterday’s press release: Square’s sales team managed to sign “one of LA’s most celebrated restaurants, Anajak Thai… due to Square Handheld, our seller-first support team, our growing restaurant software suite, and strong integrations with partners like OpenTable.”

(No shade to Anajak and absolutely no shade to the restaurant team at Square, past and current. If your role was affected and you want to continue receiving this newsletter, please reach out for a year of Expedite on me. Just respond to this email.)

ICYMI:

OpenTable launched an ads business.

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“The zine opens up an opportunity to provide context, on our own terms, about who we are and what we love, to color in the edges of your time with us. It’s like watching a film on Criterion, an…

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A Fortune profile had me nostalgic thinking about Big Delivery’s early days. How far they’ve come. Read on for a look at this newsletter’s first DoorDash mention, in September …

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TableOne expands across the US

The business of access to hot restaurants is booming. Reservations platforms (and their credit card owners and partners) tout special access to top tables, exclusive experiences, and other perks that sound fancy but are still somehow unattainable for a lot of people. A small New York-based startup is capitalizing on that access, and today will expand to six more U.S. cities.

“What [diners] are being promised from a perks standpoint is not happening,” Tarek Arafat, co-founder and CEO of TableOne, told me in an interview this morning.

Instead, Arafat and his co-founder, CTO Frank Besson, have bet on a consumer-facing platform that alerts diners of hot and available tables, fast. Table One’s curated list of restaurants spans all of the reservations programs, and for $15 per month (or $99 per year), diners (with fast fingers) can secure access to top restaurants.

TableOne started as a free service in New York. It was faster than other platforms — including Resy’s own Notify service — for technical reasons I won’t get into here. (I talked to Table One’s co-founders about it in February 2024.) It pivoted to subscriptions last September.

Later today, the company will expand to six more cities: Miami, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia. It’s what the people want, Arafat said; at least a thousand people in those cities have downloaded the Table One app and are asking for access to top restaurants in town.

TableOne hasn’t raised institutional capital, but did collect $150,000 from its subscribers in a crowdfunding campaign.

“What feels even crazier is the context we’ve been operating in: a space where massive amounts of money are flying around. Platforms buying restaurants off each other in the millions, blockbuster partnerships and acquisitions, new companies like Blackbird and Dorsia raising $50M+ each, and yet we’ve managed to carve out a meaningful footprint as a two-person operation almost entirely via word-of-mouth,” Arafat wrote in an email.

He’s not wrong.

This week on Expedite:

More of the week’s most important stories about restaurants below for paying subscribers. (It’s never too late to upgrade!)

Michelin awarded its annual stars for the Northeast and Chicago.

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-K

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Have a great weekend!

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This week on Expedite:

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This week on the pod, my co-host Brandon and I talk to restaurateur Eli Feldman of Boston’s Shy Bird (and of this awesome Q&A about the AI hackathon he hosted last month.) We’re…

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