Need An Open Table?
On Wednesday, my co-workers and I went out for dinner to celebrate my birthday. My boss left it up to me to decide. Upon a suggestion from some other co-workers, I chose Lion and Compass in Sunnyvale.
For a (planned) party of 10, though only 9 showed up, I needed reservations. When I got to the Lion and Compass website to find their phone number, I also noticed a link for online reservations. Curious, I gave it a hit. I was given the option of calling the restaurant directly, or I could use Open Table to make my reservation online.
I, of course, opted to make reservations online. I was taken to a page about the restaurant on the Open Table site. It gives me details about the restaurant, hours, where it is located, etc. In the top corner of the page, I was able to specify the date, time, and party size I was looking to book.
The exact time I specified was not available, but the site provided a reservation within 15 minutes of the requested time. In general, the site will suggest something within a 2 hour window of the date and time you specify, if available.
Once the reservation was selected and made, I was provided the ability to download an Outlook calendar entry for the reservation, making it easy to let my co-workers know when and where the dinner was.
In general, you can go to the Open Table website and search for restaurants within major metropolitan areas. While there are a number of them in the San Francisco Bay Area, there aren’t too many by where I live. They do have a handful in Tacoma, including Indochine, my wife’s current favorite place, and Stanley and Seaforts, which has an awesome view!
Open Table also provides you some incentive to use their service in the way of points that can be redeemed for a dining cheque that gives you a discount off your bill at participating restaurants–anyone that you can reserve through Open Table.
I hope they get a few more restaurants signed up for this. It’s a really nice system that worked well for me.
