Resy and OpenTable are fighting for stars, who has more Michelin Guide Restaurants in NYC?

“Where are you going for dinner?”

This is the most important question on Friday in the office, repeated across millions of New Yorkers. On our Bizops team, Christian has made it his mission this year to review 150 restaurants. You can follow him on Beli (@christiansoriano).

He actively questions the taste of our Enterprise AE Max who once reviewed Blank Street Coffee at 9.4 (?) on Beli, while simultaneously stating that Christian’s favorite restaurant Eyval was only an 8.4. Their relationship has not recovered.

You better have a reservation…

NYC is a battleground of taste. And one of the ultimate arbiters of taste is the Michelin Guide. In a city with ~20,000 restaurants, only 356 (1.2%) make it onto the Michelin Guide.

NYC is a city of lines. And snagging a reservation at any of these Michelin Guide restaurants is a feat worthy of praise. Top restaurants are often booked out weeks in advance.

This lesson hit home when I first tried to get a spot at Jeju, a 1-star Michelin, it was booked out for a month in advance on Resy. My partner was not pleased!

But the restaurant business is tough. You can get onto the Michelin Guide. You can sellout. It might not matter. One study showing that getting listed on the Guide actually correlated with an increased likelihood of closure.

So credit card companies spied an opportunity and swooped in. Amex and Visa want to lock in the wealthiest spenders and make their fees off their spending (they receive a % of every dollar spent). The wealthiest spenders want to skip the line and dine at the hottest restaurants in town. Restaurants wanted more cash.

It’s a match made in heaven.

Do you have the an Amex or a Visa?

So Amex bought Resy. They rolled out Global Dining Access, which allows their top spenders to secure exclusive dinner reservations.

They also recently bought Tock, from Squarespace for $400 million. Tock is another reservation platform with a focus on fine-dining and prepaid ticketed reservations.

There are now rumors of 7-figure exclusivity deals being signed to lock in restaurants onto the platform. I can now get my reservation at Jeju…if I just had the Amex Platinum’s Global Dining Access.

To match Amex, Visa (Chase Sapphire) partnered with OpenTable to launch their Visa Dining Collection. That new partnership armed OpenTable with cash to execute their strategy. They are now aggressively using that cash to sign new restaurants.

In a piece by the NYT, restaurateurs have confirmed cash payments being offered by OpenTable to switch off Resy ranging from $40,000 to $95,000.

To match Amex, Visa (Chase Sapphire) partnered with OpenTable to launch their Visa Dining Collection. That new partnership armed OpenTable with cash to execute their strategy. They are now aggressively using that cash to sign new restaurants.

In a piece by the NYT, restaurateurs have confirmed cash payments being offered by OpenTable to switch off Resy ranging from $40,000 to $95,000.

But is it working? Is OpenTable signing hot restaurants? We looked to DataLane’s data to find out.

Methodology

We focus on NYC only, the city in the US with the highest count of Michelin Guide restaurants.

Within our DataLane dataset, we have every restaurant in NYC (and the US), labelled with their name, zip code, website, and tech stack.

One tech stack that we track is reservation vendor, and we can detect whether a restaurant is booking reservations on Resy, OpenTable, Tock (also owned by Amex) or somewhere else.

We don’t have any data on the Michelin Guide restaurants, so we used a Kaggle open data set of all Michelin restaurants, and then matched it against our data. We join the datasets together using a match on domain, along with checks on location and restaurant name.

There are 69 restaurants with a Michelin Star in NYC. 46 of them are exclusive to Resy or Tock

71% of restaurants with a Michelin star use either Resy or Tock.

I was actually a bit surprised to see the prevalence of Tock on this list, which has a slightly higher count (16) of Michelin starred restaurants vs OpenTable (10).

Why is Tock so successful? It turns out their specific business model was uniquely suited for high-end restaurants as they pioneered concepts like prepaid deposits, which gave a lot more predictability and security for low seat count, high demand restaurants.

Jungsik is a good example of this model, where a reservation requires a prepaid deposit of $335 per person to book a slot in their Main Dining Room.