Eat All About It

As we forecast, Urbanspoon is piloting an online restaurant reservations system here in Seattle. The popular site already provided tons of information in 90+ cities on how to find a restaurant and whether to eat there. Now, a handful of high-profile Seattle eateries — Canlis, Dahlia Lounge, La Spiga, Matt’s in the Market, and Rover’s, so far — will let you reserve a table on Urbanspoon as well. Urbanspoon showed available reservations for all four earlier this evening, then gradually removed the links as the time slots passed.

I talked with Eric Tanaka of Tom Douglas Restaurants tonight about why one of the city’s leading restaurants is taking Urbanspoon for a spin. After all, the Dahlia already uses Open Table, which has long been the national giant for online restaurant reservations, with dedicated terminals and software that allows restaurants to track diners’ habits and tastes.

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Keep an eye out for a new feature on Urbanspoon. The site already cleverly maps restaurants in cities worldwide, mines useful data about them for consumers, and aggregates reviews. Now, some Seattle chefs tell me, the Spoon is looking at allowing users to make online reservations at participating restaurants — something like Open Table, but more affordable than that service, which mines data for the restaurateur but gets dinged for its costs. (It’s free to diners, but the restaurants pay.)

The folks at Urbanspoon don’t want to talk about projects that are under development, but check back — I’ll update this when there’s more to tell.

*updated 8/6. It’s live, with more information here.