Editions of Expedite’s Restaurant Links are usually a paid-only perk (and today it still is!) but I’m also sharing some exclusive reservations news!
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:
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