You can already organize fine dining excursions through a single app like OpenTable, but you still have to pull out your phone or wallet to pay when the night’s over. You won’t have to worry about the bill with Reserve’s new concierge service, though. The currently iOS-only platform lets you not only find and book tables based on your preferences, but automatically bills you after each meal (tip and all); you’ll be charged a $5 fee for the convenience, but that’s tiny in the world of haute cuisine.
It’s only natural that cofounders of Uber and Foursquare would team up and create a restaurant reservation app, no? Well that’s what they did — sort of. Garrett Camp cofounded StumbleUpon and Uber before establishing his startup studio Expa. Naveen Selvadurai joined Expa a few months ago after leaving Foursquare in 2012. The two have been hard at work on Reserve, which is now available in New York City, Los Angeles, and Boston. It’s also announcing that it has acquired SoonSpoon’s two-person team in Boston. Reserve is like a hybrid of UrbanSpoon (a service and app with reviews and restaurant recommendations), UrbanDaddy (its app serves up recommendations based on situations), OpenTable (a restaurant booking network), and Cover (a digital wallet for restaurants). Whenever you want to go out to dinner, you pull out the app, input a few pieces of info (which the app uses to surface suggestions), and pick a restaurant from the list Reserve presents.
