Battle of the (reservations) bots

Hello to TableOne, the latest way through the front door at NYC hotspots

Should we take bets on the number of restaurant tech products that Carbone’s popularity will launch? Because there’s a new one!

The New York restaurant, with outposts in Miami and Dallas and Las Vegas and beyond, is the poster child for a hard-to-get table in the increasingly high-stakes reservations game. At this point, one could argue we’ve reached late-stage Carbone hype¹. Per the Infatuation:

“Carbone is overhyped. It’s so overhyped, in fact, that you’ll hear people claim that the food here isn’t even any good. That is untrue … The only real reason to struggle for a table here is if you want to sit in a chair that Rihanna might have once occupied.”

Look, it’s a hot chair. The challenge of securing a seat at the popular Thompson Street restaurant in Manhattan sparked the idea for reservations notification service TableOne, as founder and chief technology officer Frank Besson explains. Years ago, his wife wanted to celebrate their anniversary at the hotspot, and encouraged him to find a way in the front door. So he built a tool that texted him, his wife, and eventually, friends, when available tables showed up on reservations sites.

After Besson met Tarek Arafat a year or so later, who would eventually become TableOne’s co-founder and CEO, the duo realized there was a market for this service — a service that didn’t charge diners or restaurants for their popularity, just one that worked really, really fast. 

“Marketplaces existed, members clubs existed. All of these, I’d say.. more selective private communities that are either really expensive or really exclusive. We wanted to take a different approach,” Besson says. At the end of the day, he adds, he and Arafat are normal people who want to eat at great restaurants.

TableOne co-founders Tarek Arafat and Frank Besson

Today, Diners can set notifications for about 70 New York hotspots in the TableOne app. They’ll get a push notification when a desired reservations open up. It’s like Resy Notify, but… different. In fact, Arafat pitched me on TableOne as a “response to Resy’s bot problem.” The irony is, of course, that TableOne is a bot, albeit one that reservations platforms like, according to the founders.

In-the-know diners in New York like it too. I’ll use a Carbone example again, because I can’t help myself: During a one-week period in early February, 3,768 people set TableOne alerts for Carbone tables. During the same week, TableOne sent 17,300 notifications for available Carbone tables. Impressive, but a small fraction of the 1.2 million diner notifications the service sent during that time for all the restaurants it monitors.

So, how exactly does this work? Arafat and Besson — both of whom seem exceptionally excited about this idea — explain TableOne, below. 

Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

Expedite: I’ll start with the obvious question. How exactly is this different from services like Resy Notify that are already built into platforms?