Hi there. This week we're looking at how DoorDash is changing New York's reservation landscape a few months after launching its booking feature. If you've tried it — or have thoughts on navigating the current world of reservation apps — we'd love to hear from you in the comments, or send us a message. — Melissa McCart, lead editor, Eater Northeast
In New York, perhaps the most annoying part of dining out is not just trying to snag a reservation, but navigating the various apps: Resy for this place, OpenTable for that one, a restaurant’s own booking link by way of SevenRooms, and a dozen “notify me” buttons that never seem to push alerts.
Now, a delivery giant has added one more stop. DoorDash, the company most people still associate with delivery, has rolled reservations into its app. The feature, which launched in September, is called “Going Out,” and allows users to book tables and earn dining-related rewards.
The company wants to serve across scenarios in a diner’s life: ordering in, cooking at home, and going out.
“We don’t see those as competing moments,” says Parisa Sadrzadeh, a vice president at DoorDash who led the company’s acquisition of SevenRooms. The company sees reservations as part of turning the app into a “one-stop shop for all your dining needs,” alongside groceries and takeout.
The launch follows the company’s acquisition of SevenRooms for $1.2 billion back in May. In buying SevenRooms, it not only bought a reservations platform, it bought a control panel restaurants use to manage tables, VIPs, and repeat customers — a system that SevenRooms had built.
DoorDash is betting that bundling reservations with rewards and DashPass (its subscription program for free delivery and discounts) can reshape the market. It could influence not just where diners book, but which platforms restaurants prioritize for their best tables. Just this week, the app touts “Book your table: Exclusive access with DashPass at NYC’s best spots” to earn $12 credits after every visit to certain restaurants.
In the most competitive reservations market in the country, a few months since DoorDash rolled out its booking option, it’s influencing how diners find tables, how restaurants buy demand, and how much of where and how you eat gets stitched into one profile.
How is DoorDash changing the reservation landscape?
For diners, booking gets more fragmented.
Kristen Hawley, a journalist who covers restaurant technology and reservations in her newsletter Expedite, said the biggest immediate shift is simple: more platforms, more scattered inventory.
“You don’t know who’s on what platform,” Hawley said.
As a result, she said, diners increasingly default to Google rather than browsing inside any single reservations app. In New York, that doesn’t make tables more scarce, but it does mean more juggling of reservation apps and trying to figure out where and how to get a table.
Events and exclusives become more common.
Sadrzadeh said DoorDash has already started hosting reservation-only events in New York, including collaborations with a Milan restaurant popping up at Soho’s Roscioli, and plans to expand that programming.
She said some restaurants — including Thai Diner, the Corner Store and sibling The Eighty Six, Francie, Sushi Noz — will offer reservations exclusively through DoorDash, but they’re not forcing exclusivity, she says.
“Ultimately it’s just about access,” says one restaurateur who is on DoorDash as well as other apps, “which everybody now is competing for between all the various credit cards and platforms. Everybody’s trying to figure out a way to keep their user and use a credit card that is associated to that transaction,” he says. (Multiple restaurateurs declined to talk on the record for fear of DoorDash retaliation, they said.)
Perks matter more.
Through the reservations feature, diners can earn DoorDash credits for eating at participating restaurants by submitting a receipt in the app, Sadrzadeh said. Those credits can be used on future delivery orders.
For DashPass subscribers, she says, the same membership now also includes dining-out benefits, including access to some hard-to-book reservations. “That flywheel impact has proven to be really fruitful for consumers,” Sadrzadeh said.
DashPass costs about $10 a month and offers perks like $0 delivery fees and deals on restaurant, grocery, and retail orders, making frequent deliveries cheaper.
Hawley said this incentive structure is likely to define the next phase of reservation platforms. Resy leans into its American Express ownership, she noted. OpenTable emphasizes partnerships tied to Visa programs.
One company will potentially see more of how you eat.
Hawley explains that the DoorDash-SevenRooms deal creates a new kind of data concentration.
For the first time, a major tech company can potentially connect delivery orders, third-party ordering, in-person reservations, and dine-out rewards into a single customer profile.
In practice, this means that if you order delivery twice a week at the same restaurant through DoorDash, then book a table there for Saturday night, both the restaurant and DoorDash now have a robust picture of your dining habits at that establishment. The restaurant could use that to offer you VIP treatment, or even target diners with dynamic pricing — say, upping the price of a pre-pay for in-demand restaurants. Or they might price your Saturday reservation higher than someone who has never ordered before—or lower, if they want to convert a delivery regular into a dine-in customer. DoorDash, meanwhile, gains insights into which delivery customers are likely to dine out, and where, allowing it to serve increasingly personalized recommendations and offers across channels.
When the acquisition was first announced in May, Sadrzadeh told Restaurant Business that data integration between delivery and reservations was “still to be determined.” By September, DoorDash was actively marketing this unified data view as a core feature, promising restaurants “a complete view of their first-party guests across delivery, pickup, walk-ins, and reservations.”
Hawley says she has not seen the contracts and does not know exactly what information is shared with restaurants, but the company’s own marketing materials now promote the ability for restaurants using SevenRooms to receive insights into customers who also order through DoorDash.
Sadrzadeh says DoorDash applies the same privacy standards to reservations as it does to delivery.
What’s next
DoorDash plans to launch a web-based version of its reservations product soon, Sadrzadeh says, removing the current requirement that diners use the mobile app to book. The company is also continuing to sign new restaurants in New York and expand reservation-only events, she said.
Hawley says she expects competitors to respond in kind: Resy and OpenTable are already leaning harder into credit-card partnerships, exclusive inventory, and special access. As DoorDash deepens its push into reservations, she said, those perks are likely to escalate: which means the table you want may soon depend less on when you hit refresh, and more on which app you’ve given yourself over to.
Ok it’s time to bring back calling to make a res 😭
So, the reservation will be made an hour later than you made it for, and when the food arrives at your table it will be cold?