Table37 joins growing world of dining and data
The host or hostess station can make or break a restaurant.
It is there that wait lists, reservations and occupied tables all are handled and mapped out, the server list is maintained to ensure the customers are distributed relatively equally, and pagers for waiting customers are handed out.
It's also an area of restaurant operations that hasn't changed in years, still relying largely on notepads and pens, said Todd Delehanty of Rochester, whose Table37 software is increasingly being adopted by restaurants stretching from Atlanta to Victor.
Table37 — which officially launched in January 2013 — started with a bit of fastidiousness. "I hated getting handed these dirty pagers when you walk into a restaurant," said Delehanty, who started the company after spending several years as an associate with what is now known as CDG Group LLC, a New York business restructuring and turnaround adviser. The initial idea of having restaurants text waiting patrons when their tables were ready was expanded to encompass reservations and table management.
"I knew I could make a successful company out of this," said Delehanty, 38.
Technology — especially access to data — is changing the face of running a restaurant.
"We're in such a competitive business," said Dennis Kessler, the Ackley Clinical Professor of Entrepreneurship at University of Rochester and co-owner of Kessler Restaurants LLC, which owns and operates numerous upstate Burger Kings. "We need to reach out as often as we can without being a nuisance."
The value of being able to track that you like your Whoppers without pickles and that you're currently within a mile of a Burger King means restaurants increasingly will be taking such steps as "pinging" you on your smartphone with an offer to go buy that pickleless Whopper now at a discount, Kessler said.
"We're going to be doing more data harvesting, learning more and more about who our consumer is," he said.
While Table37 has some features in common with other "make reservations with your smartphone" businesses such as OpenTable, SeatMe, CityEats and MySeat, it focuses more on the walk-in side of restaurant business, and its value for restaurants lies in how it collects and uses data, said Delehanty,who currently is working on a third version of the software with yet more features — many of them suggested by users.
Diners who have the free Table37 app on their iPhone or Android smartphones can instantly make reservations and put in special requests, like for patio seating, as well as get some basic information about the restaurant and quick links to directions and the restaurant website.
Restaurants using the iPad-based Table37 Manager can also create wait lists for walk-in diners, page patrons, and use the software to manage the flow of traffic to tables. It also lets restaurants keep track of diners' preferences for when they come back and instantly create a contact list for promotions.
The Eastview Mall location of Champps Americana installed the system about two months ago, letting it ditch its pager system, which can cost anywhere from $500 to $3,500, plus $60 or so for each lost pager — something General Manager Mike Griswold he had to do three to four times a month as patrons forget and walk off with them.
The Table37 system also gives reams of data that help in everything from scheduling workers to giving a better estimate to waiting patrons of when a table might be ready, he said..
"There are some other ones out there, but this is very effective, especially on a Friday night when we might have a 30- to 50-minute wait," Griswold said.
Griswold said he anticipated presenting it to other Champps locations in the Northeast. "This is something you could see companywide," he said.
MDANEMAN@DemocratandChronicle.com
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