Searching for a restaurant on this site, you’ll find one of two labels next to the name. They are not two ways of saying the same thing.
Instant confirmation
The place uses Bitebooker to run its dining room. When you pick a day, a time and a party size, you are looking at the restaurant’s real schedule — the services it has open, the latest time it accepts bookings, the notice it wants for the same evening. You press, and the booking lands in its book.
From there two things can happen, and the page tells you in different words:
- the table is yours: the restaurant accepted, and you’re expected;
- the booking is waiting for an answer: it arrived, but isn’t accepted yet. That happens for parties larger than the threshold the place accepts on its own, and when the room is nearly full. At that point a person decides.
The second case is not a booking. That’s why we don’t call it "confirmed": people who read "confirmed" turn up, and a table that isn’t there gets discovered at the door.
On request
The place doesn’t use Bitebooker. We don’t have its real schedule, we don’t know how many seats are free, and we can’t promise you anything. What we can do is pass your request on and tell you by when to expect an answer.
Two things this site tells you straight away, instead of letting you find out by waiting:
- by when. Not "we’ll let you know": the day and time after which, if nothing has arrived, it’s worth phoning.
- whether the place was reached at all. It happens: the contact on public record may not exist or may no longer be theirs. Your request then stays useful to us, but useless to you — and we say so the moment you send it, not three hours later.
Telling them apart before you click
The label sits next to the name, both in search results and on the listing. And results have a filter: only places that confirm the table straight away. If you’re arranging dinner for tonight and have no time to wait for an answer, that’s the one to switch on.
This site does one thing: find a table and book it.