Your Dining Profile Is Already a Thing — and It’s Changing Your Next Restaurant Table

A recent Instagram reel of a restaurant host explaining what she can see about customers who reserve through the OpenTable app has gone viral. Whenever we download an app, we quickly scroll through the paragraphs detailing everything we’re agreeing to by using that app, and we check the box giving permission to whatever it was we just barely read. One of those permissions is agreeing to OpenTable’s privacy policy — meaning you give OpenTable permission to use your data and to share that data with restaurants. Some restaurant owners have noticed lately the all-too-familiar icon of sparkly stars indicating the use of AI.

The OpenTable website explains something called Guest Intelligence that “provides restaurants with a complete picture of their guests’ dining habits, both within their restaurant and across the OpenTable network.” In other words, AI is being used to compile data about customers so they can be better attended to. This would explain why the host knows that a particular customer might tend to order more cocktails than the average customer, or tends to show up late for their reservation. This is a much more particular profile than scribbling a couple of notes into a spiral notebook — like when reservations were kept by hand. It’s tracking your behavior, not just at this restaurant, but at every restaurant you use the app for.

If you’re consistently late for your reservations, any restaurant you go to in the future is going to know that. If the app informs them that you tend to stay longer than the average customer, this may influence where they choose to seat you. A customer who stays 45 minutes longer than another customer probably won’t get that sought-after window seat. Maybe your profile indicates your love for wine, and the server will then know what to suggest to you. Your reputation precedes you.

Most restaurant workers I spoke with admit they don’t fully take advantage of everything reservation apps have to offer. It certainly depends on the restaurant, and an upscale restaurant is far more likely to use this information to its full advantage. SevenRooms is a New York City-based reservation app that fully embraces the use of AI. Its website states that its AI-driven tools “enhance customer satisfaction and boost profits effortlessly.” By compiling the data from each time a customer goes to a restaurant, the app can make suggestions to the restaurant about what the customer might be looking for in a dining experience. It sounds good on paper, but it might feel weird for a customer when a server shows up to the table with a dessert cart full of their favorite desserts two minutes after they take their last bite of their entrée.

As AI creeps more and more into our lives, our digital footprint grows in size. The more we use it, the more it will know about us. In the interest of wanting to impress customers, restaurants will probably begin to pay more attention to the profile that’s being created. Many of the details in a profile are things customers can add themselves, like food allergies, birthdays, and anniversaries. At this point, restaurant workers I spoke with confirmed that any notes they add about a customer stay within that restaurant and are not shared with other restaurants. The shared information is all based on what a person orders, what time they get there, and what time they leave. Basically, just things that a computer can keep track of — it’s just data.

But could the next step be a more personal profile about the customers’ personalities and how they interact with staff? Might it be like our Uber scores where drivers can rate us just like we can rate them? Personally, I have 4.76 stars on my Uber profile and I don’t know what I did to not have a perfect five. Maybe I slammed the door too hard or made a driver wait too long once. Now, I make certain to be an exemplary rider because I don’t want to give a driver any reason to not want to pick me up when I need to go somewhere.

We aren’t quite there in the restaurant world yet, but always be on your best behavior when dining out. Big Brother is watching. He knows you were late to your reservation last time, and, in the future, he might know you were rude to the staff, and you sent your food back to the kitchen three times. You don’t want to give a restaurant any reason to decline your reservation.