Hi from the cool kids' table

An OpenTable vs. Resy Q&A with Grub Street journalist Elizabeth G. Dunn

photo via Unsplash

I have to imagine that no one was happier on Tuesday morning than the team at OpenTable reading a headline about their success: “The cool restaurants are on OpenTable now,” Grub Street proclaimed. And I have to imagine that it was particularly sweet to read in Grub Street, a publication that covers New York City, since for years the restaurant scene has been dominated by the company’s chief competitor, Resy.

“Resy was born in New York and did all of its initial restaurant recruiting in New York. Just as of a couple of years ago, you would pretty much never see a restaurant where you really wanted to eat that was on OpenTable,” journalist Elizabeth G. Dunn, the author of the Grub Street piece, told me in an interview. (Dunn also writes

Consumed

, an excellent newsletter about the food business.)

She’s right. Two years ago, based on a similar observation, a headline in Eater New York declared, “Resy won.” I quickly disputed this from my West Coast perch — it was a short-sighted observation, I argued, given the volatile and unpredictable conditions that characterized a post-Covid restaurant industry. But I’ll concede that Resy was winning the popularity contest at the time, and reservations at hot restaurants were very hard to come by. What was less visible then, though, were the changes happening behind the scenes at OpenTable under CEO Debby Soo, then two-and-a-half years into her tenure. Two years later, restaurants seem to have noticed.

(Speaking of happy OpenTable employees, I asked Soo what she thought of the Grub Street piece. “This piece really captures several years of hard work across every team at OpenTable,” she said over email. “I’m proud of how far we’ve come and that the industry is supportive of our brand. Because at the end of the day, everything we do is in service to them.”)

In her Grub Street coverage, Dunn ascribes OpenTable’s resurgence among “cool” restaurants to a mix of revamped tech, marketing, and leadership. Somewhat shockingly — at least to me, someone who’s covered the business for over a decade — restaurants are saying that Resy’s gone corporate thanks to its 2019 acquisition by American Express. Talk about the tables turning.

There’s always more to the story than gets printed, so I was stoked to speak with Dunn on Tuesday, just after Grub Street published this story. Here’s more of her perspective on the topic of reservations apps, informed by lots of reporting on a very New York story.

Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Expedite: I’m glad you led this story with the Welcome Conference anecdote. I was there, and while I was walking to one of the many busses lined up outside Lincoln Center to ferry guests to the OpenTable afterparty, I overheard a person high up at Resy complaining that the busses were disrespectful. It was a poignant moment.