You’re Clicking Around Our Website; That’s Good. Here’s some thinking behind what we’re doing.
Big city restaurants have been an island of technological stall for a long time. We can count on one hand — OpenTable, micros*, Twitter, blogs — the platforms that have fundamentally changed the way restaurants do business in the last decade. Three of these services are discovery tools and the other is a back-of-house system. Most of the restaurant business is the same as it ever was.
Thus generally begins my Resy sales pitch, and did when I recently met with Anthony Rudolf. He was the Director of Operations at Per Se from 2011 to 2013 and is now building the NYC Dining Room Collective. “Restaurateurs spend 16 hours a day just making sure the things that are working stay working,” was his counter. There just isn’t time in the day to focus on trying new things, is the point.
So while that’s as good an explanation as I’ve gotten for the industry’s lack of innovation—and it’s a good one—it’s no longer the whole story. Restaurants have become premium entertainment, yet their margins are thinning. And, most importantly, it’s finally clear to consumers how far behind restaurants are. The idea that I have to logon to OpenTable at exactly 12:01 AM to get a table at Sushi Nakazowa thirty days from now is fundamentally insane, thanks Uber.
It’s time for these restaurateurs to get out of the weeds and we’re excited about where technology is finally leading them. We believe that great new services in the entertainment and travel categories are a good preview of how the restaurant industry will have to start thinking—and how we’re thinking about Resy in order to make our app work for you. Resy launches this summer. Stay tuned.
*Micros is one of several point-of-sale systems that dominate, but it’s sort of become the xerox or kleenex of POS systems. When I asked Dave Chang about the most important technology in his restaurants he immediately said Micros, even though they actually use Aloha.
