Barrio drops Open Table reservation system, switches to Eveve
Open Table lost another Twin Cities customer Monday.
Barrio left Open Table for Eveve this week.
Barrio's three restaurants--in Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Cocina del Barrio--switched their online reservation account to local company Eveve, which has been steadily siphoning off the company's business in Minnesota since spring.
"It just came down to the economics of it," says Ryan Burnet, owner of Barrio. "It makes more sense for us."
Burnet estimates Barrio was paying "three or four times more at Open Table" than Eveve will charge them.
"I don't think we were seeing the benefit of it," Burnet says of Open Table's reservation system.
Barrio joins a list of high-profile restaurants including Meritage, Hell's Kitchen, and Bar La Grassa that have teamed up with Eveve in the past few months.
Open Table boasts that it's been serving the Twin Cities for seven years and hosts online reservations for more than 230 local restaurants.
"We've always had competition in the marketplace," writes Tiffany Cox in an email to City Pages. "However, the chief competitor remains the pen and paper reservation book."
Cox questioned whether Eveve can handle the businesses it's taking on.
"In terms of the competitor you referenced below, what we're hearing from restaurant customers who experimented with it and subsequently decided to return to OpenTable is that the software they tried was not robust or reliable enough for their reservation-intensive businesses," Cox wrote.
Eveve's owner shrugs off Cox's criticism.
"It's fairly well known that, by volume, Hell's Kitchen is the busiest restaurant in town," Timothy Ryan says. "They've done this service for four months now."
Ryan projects future growth for his company.
"I think the fact that they're not taking us seriously is going to haunt them," Ryan says. "I believe that 50 restaurants will switch to us by Christmas."
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Open Table and the cost of making reservations
Meritage and Hell's Kitchen drop Open Table: The exodus begins?
Eveve v. Open Table: More prominent Twin Cities restaurants switch reservation services
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