Entrepreneur strives to cut time spent waiting for table

April 9, 2021

Ben Whitley is hoping those who value time and technology will help his new business take off.

He has created an app, BoothOrTable, that publishes live wait times at restaurants and offers mobile check-in.

Whitley co-founded the startup with his brother-in-law, Matthew Watt, and it has been operational in a testing phase since early March.

Currently, it functions as an app on the restaurant-facing side and a web plug-in on the customer-facing side. Guests don’t need to download an app or create an account to check in with BoothOrTable; they simply visit the restaurant’s website, where they’ll see a live wait time and the option to check in by entering their name, email address and how many people are in their party.

For restaurant management, the system is also relatively simple. Within the app, they are able to manually update the expected wait time as it shifts. When someone checks in, the restaurant receives a notification, and they are added to the waitlist.

“The goal was to create something that could drive more traffic to restaurants and help them maximize their revenue,” Whitley said in a statement.


R Wine Bar & Kitchen, has been beta-testing the app for about a month now, and owner Riccardo Tarabelsi said he’s already experiencing the benefits, including increased efficiency for his staff.

“I’ll put it this way: It doesn’t take as long to update the wait time on BoothOrTable as it does to answer the phone,” he said.

For guests, it eliminates the frustration of arriving at a restaurant only to be informed of a 40-minute wait, Whitley said. With BoothOrTable, they can check the wait time from anywhere and then check in online, freeing up the time they would have spent sitting in a crowded restaurant lobby waiting for their name to be called.

“This is for anyone in the restaurant business who is looking to potentially drive more traffic. It’s really capturing those spontaneous guests — the person who says, ‘Hey, we should go to R Wine Bar, let’s check in now,’ as opposed to making a reservation days in advance,” Tarabelsi said.

For restaurant owners, the hope is that publishing wait times will provide a better experience and more predictability for guests.

Whitley recently completed the CO.STARTERS accelerator program through the Zeal Center for Entrepreneurship, where he worked on refining the concept and nailing down key business strategies.

Through conversations with local restaurant owners, he has learned more about the importance of integration with existing guest management systems such as Aloha or Toast.

Integrating at R Wine Bar was simple, but Whitley has met other interested restaurant owners who have been unable to make it work with their current system. It’s a challenge he’s trying to solve by brainstorming different approaches for successful integration.

“I really haven’t met anybody that works harder than Ben on this,” Tarabelsi said. “He loves bullet points and lists, and he’s good at taking in feedback and then either asking more questions or turning it into, ‘Hey, we fixed that, what do you think?’ ”

There’s also a benefit to having a personal, local service provider, he added.

“I’m an entrepreneur, so I love Ben’s entrepreneurial spirit, but it’s also about working with someone local, which became apparent early on in the process before it was live and when he was still building it,” Tarabelsi said. “He was asking me a ton of questions, and I was able to give him tons of feedback. He’s a really effective communicator.”

BoothOrTable is actively seeking beta-testers. Restaurants can learn more by clicking here.

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Entrepreneur strives to cut time spent waiting for table

Want more predictability in your restaurant waits? How about checking in before you get there? A Sioux Falls entrepreneur is working to make it happen.

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