Are You a Red Wine Lover or a Cautious Eater? OpenTable Knows
If you’re a red wine drinker, a big spender at dinner, or someone who tends to linger at the table long after dessert, there’s a decent chance OpenTable has noticed. The popular reservation platform has started feeding restaurant staff with profile-style insights drawn from your past orders and spending patterns. Book a table and the staff may already have a read on your habits — without you ever knowing.
Kat Menter, a host at a Michelin-starred establishment and a food blogger who writes under the name Eating Out Austin, flagged these “AI-assisted” tags in a TikTok post after spotting them during a shift. The notes flagged whether customers regularly order certain drinks, spend above average, or have a history of last-minute cancellations. “Mine just says ‘juice,'” she laughed, pointing to her well-known love of brunch. Fair enough, really.
For a lot of people, this will come as a genuine surprise. Most of us open OpenTable to book a table and nothing more, not thinking much about what the platform picks up along the way.
OpenTable is built to be more than a booking tool. It handles waitlists, marketing, and integrates with point-of-sale systems like Toast and Epos — automating everything from order processing to inventory. That POS connection is exactly what lets it piece together a picture of your dining behaviour. Even if you didn’t book through OpenTable directly, if you have an account and your phone number or email is on file, your dining history can still get attached to your profile.
That said, what OpenTable actually holds on you may be less alarming than you’d expect. After requesting my data through their privacy rights form, what came back was pretty thin: basic contact details, reservation history, and minimal credit card information. Not quite the dossier you might imagine.
High-end restaurants — particularly those chasing or holding Michelin stars — have long done their own homework on guests. Some dig through social media before a booking. Others keep detailed internal records. Lazy Bear in San Francisco, for instance, maintains a database of past patrons. Menter’s own restaurant logs punctuality and preferences, and staff get reminders like, “This diner brings first dates — act like it’s their first visit.”
“We keep track of details like your child’s name, dining frequency, and favorite dishes,” says Menter. “Everything is geared toward creating a delightful dining experience.”
She’s cautious about the OpenTable tags, though. “We’ve been taking them with a grain of salt,” she says, noting they can seem arbitrary. The AI pulls from multiple dining occasions and lumps them together, which creates room for error. Someone tagged as a “high spender” might have just expensed a business dinner once.
OpenTable hasn’t said much about how long it has been pulling data from POS systems or when it started sharing any of this with restaurants. Mary-Kate Smitherman, the company’s senior director of communications, describes the AI tags as a beta feature currently limited to restaurants on OpenTable Pro. The AI itself doesn’t process individual guest data directly — it reads menu item descriptions and groups orders into categories, so a “glass of cabernet” becomes “red wine.”
Smitherman says the goal cuts both ways: useful for the restaurant, better for the diner. Knowing your preferences could help a server steer you toward a dish you’ll like or read the room on how fast to pace the meal.
The privacy policy around all this is a bit murky, though. It tells users their dining history will be visible to restaurants when they book, and lists what gets shared — name, contact info, party size — but stays vague on the finer details of what “summarising previous dining activities” actually means in practice.
Elsewhere in the policy, OpenTable acknowledges collecting POS data — items ordered, total bills — and says it will only be used to produce aggregate insights. Smitherman clarifies that this includes aggregated insights about individual customers, which means your past visits could shape how a restaurant reads you. So yes, you might genuinely be filed away as a red wine person.
There is a way out. Log into your OpenTable account, go to your profile, and in the “Preferences” section, uncheck the option that lets OpenTable use POS information. It’s a small step, but it puts a bit of distance between your dinner and your data.
OpenTable’s main rival, Resy, handles this differently. Resy does collect transaction data but doesn’t share it with unaffiliated restaurants — so what happens at one place stays there.
OpenTable was never purely a booking tool; it’s always been part of a wider system where your dining habits feed into something larger. Right now the impact on your actual meal is pretty limited, but it gives you a clear sense of where things are heading.
As Menter puts it, “These tags are akin to unreliable tips from an anonymous narrator. You were probably going to receive decent service anyway.” The blend of AI and hospitality still feels like an experiment — worth watching, but not worth losing sleep over just yet.
