DoorDash Enters Restaurant Reservations Market

The Table Is the New Delivery

DoorDash built its business delivering food from restaurants to homes. Now it wants to also get you into the restaurant. The company has expanded into restaurant reservations, targeting some of America's most sought-after dining establishments — the kind of restaurants where securing a table requires persistence, timing, and in some cases, payment of a premium that makes the entree look cheap by comparison.

The move positions DoorDash directly against Resy and OpenTable, the two dominant restaurant reservation platforms, and reflects the company's broader ambition to become the central platform for how Americans discover, book, and experience restaurants rather than just a logistics service that delivers food from them.

The Reservation Scalping Era

DoorDash's entry into reservations comes after a turbulent period for dining reservation culture. The rise of services like Appointment Trader and Dorsia — which allowed users to buy and sell restaurant reservations at market rates — exposed the latent demand for access to exclusive dining experiences and the failure of free reservation systems to allocate that access satisfactorily.

Restaurants disliked scalping services for several reasons: they captured value that should flow to the restaurant, they could enable no-show behavior when scalped reservations were not resold, and they distorted the dining room composition away from the regular customers restaurants valued. Several high-profile restaurants responded with deposit-based reservation systems — effectively charging for reservations upfront — while others moved to tasting menu formats that require payment at booking time.

DoorDash's approach appears to be building a premium reservation tier that captures some of the demand previously served by scalping apps, but within a structure that restaurants endorse and participate in voluntarily.

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The Platform Strategy

For DoorDash, the strategic logic of adding reservations is about closing the loop on restaurant engagement. A user who discovers a restaurant through DoorDash's marketplace, orders delivery, saves the restaurant in their app, and then wants to dine in-person currently leaves the DoorDash ecosystem to book a table through Resy or OpenTable. The reservations feature keeps that engagement within DoorDash's platform.

The aggregated dining data that results — who orders delivery from which restaurants, which restaurants they then visit in person, how frequently they return, what they order versus what they deliver — is valuable for both DoorDash's algorithmic recommendations and for the restaurants themselves, who gain a more complete picture of customer relationship value across delivery and in-person dining.