Expedite

OpenTable is rewarding diners who are loyal to its platform, potentially downgrading some prestige credit card holders in the process. The reservations service will grant special access to in-demand tables to repeat OpenTable bookers. At the same time, OpenTable and Visa will sunset the Visa Dining Collection program in the US, which granted priority access to certain Visa credit cardholders. (Maybe you heard me mention that that deal was set to expire last month?

Expedite is back from vacation. While I catch up, here are a few stories of note from the last two weeks. More soon! I know. I know. But I can’t be the only one. Restaurant workers’ …uh, beef with industry drama The Bear has been well documented; plenty of people say that the realistic depictions of life inside a high-pressure kitchen can trigger PTSD or just makes watching TV feel like work.

In March, I broke a big news story. American Express, parent company of reservations platforms Tock and Resy, cancelled an industry dinner and pulled its support of Noma Los Angeles following allegations of abuse against its head chef. Restaurant tech company Blackbird did, too. High-end, fine-dining restaurant Noma losing some sponsorships is not the most important angle of this story — but I do believe it is the most consequential.

Today’s edition of Expedite is unlocked, courtesy of Eater. Finding the right restaurant is both a science and an art. Recent tech advances have the science on lock; there’s no shortage of service and apps and sites and social media accounts vying for attention with promises of perfect and personalized restaurant suggestions for any occasion. The art is much, much trickier. Even in an age of unprecedented technological progress, it requires a distinctly human touch.

🏝 Expedite is on summer vacation this week! Please enjoy this guest post by my friend and fellow restaurant journalist Gloria Dawson, who recently launched In the Weeds, a publication about the business of independent restaurants. The Baker’s Table offers an approachable, thoughtful tasting menu that changes monthly and, thanks to its membership program, welcomes many familiar faces.

šŸ Iā€™m headed out on vacation for the next two weeks but have some good content lined up while Iā€™m gone, including a new episode of my podcast, The Simmer, coming next week. Toast is looking for a new kind of restaurant partner. The point of sale and payments company is actively recruiting an operator to build a new restaurant concept in Boston alongside the tech companyā€™s product teams. Toast will fund the opening ā€” or at least ā€œhelpā€ to fund the opening ā€” per a release.

The morning after SevenRooms co-founder and chief product officer Allison Page posted an aggressive diatribe on LinkedIn against competitor OpenTable, I had a friendly coffee with a DoorDash insider. The delivery giant had closed on its acquisition of SevenRooms over six months earlier, but my coffee date was surprised by Page’s tone in the post as she criticized a change to OpenTable’s terms of service that could make it harder for restaurants on OpenTable to also work with her company.

On Monday morning, American Express announced its plans to acquire European reservations platform TheFork for $700 million in cash. The deal is expected to close later this year subject to regulatory approval and, when completed, will bring the total number of bookable venues on the American Express network — those on Amex-owned Resy, Tock, and TheFork — to 75,000, per a release.

A year ago in May, DoorDash announced it would acquire reservations service SevenRooms for $1.2 billion. The deal shook up the reservations business as SevenRooms’s deeply entrenched incumbents, Resy and OpenTable, navigated a rapidly evolving landscape alongside a newly enriched competitor. SevenRooms launched in 2011. Its founding executives continue to lead the company today, and SevenRooms is operating more or less independently from its delivery giant overlords.

Is it possible to reach peak personalization? Because I think I found it in my email inbox. It’s not that the personalized emails I received from a handful of full-service restaurants were too personal… it’s that they were far too similar. Here’s what happened: My birthday is coming up. I’m not particularly secretive about it and have grown accustomed, almost indifferent, to the string of marketing emails, birthday discounts, and well-wishes that arrive each June.