OpenTable CEO Debby Soo On What It Really Means To Serve A Service Industry

When Debby Soo became CEO of OpenTable in 2020, the idea of booking a table felt about as relevant as dial-up internet. Restaurants were closed, staff were furloughed, and the broad outlook on the hospitality industry’s future was, in a word, bleak. But for Soo—who joined the restaurant tech platform after a decade at Kayak, where she rose from intern to Chief Commercial Officer—the pandemic offered one unexpected gift: time to listen.

“I didn’t grow up in restaurants,” she says. “I had to learn the business as a CEO. On top of that, I couldn’t travel, couldn’t walk the floors, couldn’t shake hands, so I sat in my basement, opened up Zoom, and started listening. And writing. Writing everything.”

She took copious notes in those early days—pages of observations, questions, and red flags. “Especially the things that made my spidey sense go off,” she says. “Because once you’re in the system long enough, all the weird things start to feel normal.”

Three themes emerged early. First: pricing. “We were expensive. We had a one-size-fits-all model, and that didn’t make sense,” she says. “A 20-seat omakase isn’t the same as a 400-cover brasserie.”

So OpenTable restructured its pricing into something more flexible. Remarkably, the company managed to grow while reducing costs for many of its partners. “It had implications for the P&L,” she admits. “But we did it.”

The second issue: product stagnation. “We pioneered the category 27 years ago,” she says, “but our competitors had started iterating faster, and when restaurants asked us for features, we weren’t getting it done.”

That’s changed. While Soo admits her first three years were primarily focused on product and engineering, the company has rolled out more than 80 product updates in the last 18 months alone, many driven by direct restaurant feedback.

And then there was the brand. “When I joined, our consumer app looked like it was built in 1998—because it was,” she laughs. “It was stale. It felt corporate.”

What also became clear was that OpenTable’s centre of gravity had to shift. “Before I joined, we allocated resources equally to diners and restaurants. But restaurants are the ones who pay us,” Soo says. “That’s where the flywheel starts.”

As a result, Soo’s restructured around one priority: helping restaurants run better, fuller, smarter dining rooms.

Beyond charging restaurants for access to its reservation, guest management, and demand-driving tools, OpenTable has become a brilliant case study in business of applied AI. Recently, the platform has integrated voice bots from PolyAI and Slang.ai that handle reservations, sync bookings, and answer common diner questions; offered chat tools that respond to reviews in a restaurant’s preferred tone; and released machine learning-driven reflow feature that helps optimise turn times and boost covers.

“Some places see a 30% increase in revenue, just from using the reflow feature,” Soo says. “That’s the kind of tech I care about—tech that makes the restaurant more money without making the team work harder.”

The company’s latest release, Concierge, signals a major step forward in that direction. Launched this week, Concierge is a generative AI-powered assistant embedded within each restaurant’s OpenTable profile. It can suggest what to order, help navigate dietary needs, and surface key venue details, removing friction from the booking process for diners and saving time for restaurant staff.

It’s powered by OpenTable’s deep well of restaurant data, from menus to reviews, alongside integrations with OpenAI and Perplexity. Diners can already use natural language prompts—“gluten-free seafood, family-friendly, award-winning, in Boston”—to get instant, bookable recommendations. “We already have the data,” Soo says. “It’s just about surfacing it better.” Future versions will even be able to make bookings directly.

Soo’s proudest achievement isn’t technological, not even financial, but reputational. When she joined, OpenTable didn’t have relationships with many of the industry’s top restaurants. “We’ve been on a mission to sign and partner with the best and most awarded restaurants,” she says. “When I started, I’d look on, you know, the New York Times list, James Beard finalists or semi-finalists, and I would type each one into OpenTable to see if they were partnered, and the numbers were quite disappointing.”

That’s no longer the case. “This year, right as these lists come out, our showing of OpenTable restaurants are orders of magnitude higher,” she says. “Each one that we sign is definitely a labour of love.”

All of which, to me, begs the question: where does the CEO of a dining platform focused on signing the best of the best like to eat? “Not fine dining, actually,” Soo says. “I love elevated everyday food—hearty, ingredient-driven, somewhere like Potluck Club in New York. Food you can eat every day, made with care.”

Like the food she gravitates towards, Soo’s leadership avoids over-complication. It’s measured, deliberate, and grounded in the essentials. Even at the pandemic’s boiling point, OpenTable didn’t opt for reinvention, but doubled down on serving the restaurants that gave it relevance in the first place. The effects are already apparent, too. OpenTable’s 2025 data shows steady growth in seated diners across all major markets, and a renewed affiliation with the platforms and lists that shape the industry. Many of the restaurants that had drifted are not only back, but investing in the tools the company’s been careful to curate for them.

Understandably, Soo checks in with those early notes regularly, reminding herself of prior friction points and the many recalibrations that made OpenTable an industry leader again. In a tech landscape that prizes the new, Soo’s approach feels almost unorthodox, but that may very well be why it’s working