When Did Making Reservations Get So Annoying?

A version of this post originally appeared in Eater Today, which spotlights the freshest news and stories from across the food world every day. Subscribe now.

I’ve never really liked the Resy interface. It’s functional when I know exactly where I want to eat and when, and can therefore go directly to the restaurant’s Resy page and select a time, but God forbid my search has to be any more advanced or flexible than that.

Dinner for two at 6:30 p.m. on a Wednesday night, anywhere in North Brooklyn or Lower Manhattan? Well, tough luck: Restaurants that I know exist at a specific intersection and that I know are on Resy (I know this because I can go to their individual bookings pages and see that they have availability at that exact time on that exact night) fail to populate on the map, or on the platform’s list of available venues. (“It only ever shows me sushi restaurants?” said one colleague, when I verified that this was, in fact, a common experience and not a skill issue.) And yet, what’s that they say about “the devil you know”?

In New York City, here’s what it feels like to make a reservation now (especially if I’m trying to go to a relatively new, relatively in-demand restaurant). Let’s say that as a starting point, I would like to go to our 2025 Best New Restaurant Bong, which is on Resy. Predictably, there’s still not a table to be seen before 9 p.m., which is the very latest I’d consider going to dinner. Hmm, I might think. What else is on my to-eat list? Perhaps the hype over Wild Cherry has died down? That doesn’t come up on Resy, because the Google search that follows tells me that it’s actually on OpenTable, as with Riad Nasr and Lee Hanson’s other restaurants. OpenTable surfaces zero open tables; the hype has not died down.

So, how about Adda? It’s been a while and I haven’t checked out the new location. Last I tried, Adda was on Resy. But then, wait, there’s that email I got a few months ago telling me that “booking looks different now,” because the restaurant has moved to DoorDash Reservations, powered by SevenRooms. A secret third thing! I don’t have that app, nor do I care to download it.

That reminds me: A similar email appeared in my inbox last week from the Italian restaurant Swoony’s. “Book a table through our website or Google Reserve,” it told me, both options of which appear to also be powered by SevenRooms. As if reservations weren’t already hard enough to get based on availability alone, we must now seemingly keep track of several apps simultaneously and have a mental index of which one each restaurant uses — woof! When did the very act of making a reservation or finding one get so tedious, requiring all this cross-referencing and Google searching and the downloading of so many separate apps?

For this user-experience hell, we can blame only the continued reservation wars. It was hard enough to keep track a few years ago, when waves of cool restaurants started making the switch from Resy to OpenTable in late 2024, wooed by the latter’s promises of revitalized tech (and, as the rumors go, compelling financial incentives as well) as it tried to regain cultural relevance. Now, the idea of the status-conferring reservations platform has fully gone out the window: It’s like every restaurant is ping-ponging around ever more platforms as companies try to get in on the reservations game.

In September 2025, food-delivery platform DoorDash announced its entry into the niche as well, following the company’s acquisition of the reservations platform SevenRooms a few months earlier. In NYC, DoorDash has since scored in-demand restaurants such as the entire Unapologetic Foods group, which includes the aforementioned Adda and the trendy Semma.

And while SevenRooms grows its list of restaurants, Resy has also made moves to bulk up its portfolio. Earlier this year, Amex announced that it was folding Tock into Resy, ending Tock’s existence as a standalone brand but adding about 8,000 venues to Resy’s offerings. In June, Expedite’s Kristen Hawley, who’s been at the forefront of restaurant tech coverage, reported that Amex is now in the process of acquiring European reservations platform TheFork, which could put it ahead of OpenTable in terms of its number of restaurants globally. (Despite OpenTable’s diminished cool factor amid Resy’s rise to prominence, the company has boasted massive reach, with more than 60,000 restaurants using it.)

There are, it should be said, some upsides here, especially since one company holding the lion’s share of the reservations market is objectively bad for restaurant operators. More booking platforms means restaurateurs can now pick and choose from a marketplace of options as opposed to feeling locked into one of two. And as Eater NY’s Melissa McCart put it, the increased competition between companies has also meant some new perks for diners, such as exclusive restaurant offerings and special access to restaurants, though these are typically tethered to having specific credit cards.

But speaking purely from the point of view of the diner experience, especially as someone without a fancy credit card, it feels a little bit like another form of enshittification. Just as I can no longer rely on the first page of a Google search to find the very specific thing I’m looking for, I can no longer go to my trusted reservations app and seamlessly find the reservation I want. Despite Google’s increasingly obvious flaws, this system can push us back into an overreliance on Google, which is something I’ve also grown very resentful of in recent months, for similar enshittification reasons.

This is now the predictable tech trajectory: Tech companies get everyone hooked on something (cheap rideshares, cheap food delivery, easy reservations) and then make the experience worse, harder, or paywalled. While I might have more capacity and patience than most people to remember that Lei and Bridges are on Resy but that Sunn’s and Demo are on OpenTable (and all of those examples are with a heavy, implied “for now”), I can say with some certainty that most people would rather devote that mental space to literally anything else.

Perhaps there’s a lesson to be learned from all of this. Perhaps, as with downloading more dating apps in pursuit of more suitors, most of whom have grown flaky and flighty from the tendency to do the same thing, there is a limit to how much one can play the field. Perhaps my frustration with app-switching and Google searching is a sign to stop and look at what’s already in my roster, on the app with the flaws I have already come to accept — at least until those restaurants make the switch to another one.

Plus, there’s always the Eater app, which now offers the ability to book reservations across multiple platforms without having to hunt for them.