The booking form is deliberately short, and every field has a reason. They are worth spelling out, because at least three of them are not obvious.
When
Day and time. The times you see are the restaurant’s real ones, and not every hour is there: which rules remove them is in another article. Under the choice it says how long the table normally lasts — «normally it is yours for about 1h 30m» — which is the piece of information usually missing, and the difference between arriving relaxed and finding out on arrival that you have an hour.
How many of you
Three numbers, and they come filled in: 2 adults, 0 children, 0 pets.
Two adults is the normal case, and someone who is three changes a number instead of typing one from scratch. A form that opens empty asks a question whose answer is nearly always the same.
⚠️ Pets are counted but take no seat at the table. The line under the field says so: they are there so the place knows what to expect — whether there is room beside the table, whether the indoor room works. They are not covers, and writing one does not cost you a chair.
Anything to tell them
Optional, and the help line gives three examples which are the three real ones: high chair, allergies, table outside. It is the field the restaurant reads before laying the table, so write the concrete thing in it, not the courtesy.
Who you are
Name, phone and email. All three are needed, and that is a difference from a table request, where one of phone or email is enough: here the booking goes into the book of a place that is expecting you, and if the room changes something they have to be able to reach you that same evening.
The two checkboxes, which are not the same thing
- «I consent to my data being processed to manage this booking» is required, and the line under it says why in six words: *without it, we cannot pass your name to the restaurant*. What happens to that data is in how we handle it.
- «I want to receive news from this restaurant» is optional, and concerns that restaurant, not us. Left unticked, you book exactly the same way.
Two checkboxes side by side, one required and one not, are the classic place where people agree to something they did not mean to: which is why they are written out in full, not as «I accept the terms».
And if sending fails
You come back to the form with a sentence saying what went wrong, and the day and the numbers are still there. Name, phone and email are not: those you retype.
⚠️ That is not an oversight, it is deliberate. To hand them back they would have to travel through the page’s address — and an address with your phone number in it ends up in the browser’s history, in the server’s logs, and in the header the browser sends to the next site. Retyping a number costs ten seconds; a number written in three places costs forever.
This site does one thing: find a table and book it.