How Ben Leventhal built Eater and Resy from restaurant obsession

Executive overview

Most restaurant tech ignores what restaurants actually need. Ben Leventhal co-founded Eater as a scrappy blog, then built Resy after seeing firsthand how thin restaurant margins are and how poorly existing tools served operators.

Resy's first model — surge pricing for seats — failed within months. Listening to restaurants led to a pivot toward flat-fee table management software, which became the real business.

Operators will tell you what to build if you're willing to hear "no" enough times first.

From newsletter to media company

• Started as an anonymous weekly newsletter, "She Loves New York," covering 10–20 restaurants per issue
• Reached ~10,000 subscribers before partnering with Lockhart Steel, managing editor of Gawker
• Launched Eater as a subdomain of Steel's blog Curbed, posting restaurant news rather than reviews
• Deliberately avoided food photos and formal criticism — focused on cadence, insider access, and voice
• "Death Watch" section tracked struggling restaurants; acknowledged in hindsight as harsh to its subjects
• Broke embargo norms by posting unsolicited press releases immediately, which infuriated publicists but built audience
• Funded by an angel round; ran lean with freelancers; grew to national markets with New York as center of gravity
• Eater and Curbed sold to Vox, reportedly for $20–30M

The surge pricing idea and why it failed

• Core thesis: restaurants have one price regardless of demand — Friday 7:30pm costs the same as Tuesday 5pm
• Resy 1.0 charged diners $10–$100 for a reservation; restaurants kept ~80%, Resy took 20%
• Also experimented with distinguishing table types (outdoor, bar, dining room) and selling guaranteed outdoor seats in summer
• Restaurants resisted: hospitality carries a "first come, first serve" psychology that makes variable pricing feel unfair, even where it's accepted in concerts or airlines
• Workaround: let restaurants donate their cut to charity — made it easier for them to say yes
• By end of 2014 (five months in), clear the model wouldn't scale

The pivot to reservation software

• Restaurants gave consistent feedback: build table management and booking widgets, not premium pricing
• Resy deployed booking widgets on restaurant websites — first major traction signal
• Pricing: flat monthly fee ($99 or $399), no per-cover charge regardless of volume
• Rationale: charging more-successful restaurants more is "insane" — flat fee aligns incentives
• Built a universal guest database across multi-location restaurant groups — a feature competitors hadn't prioritized
• Won an Airbnb partnership (commercial deal plus investment) by competing against other reservation platforms
• Expanded from New York to LA and beyond as restaurants sought an alternative to OpenTable

The American Express acquisition and COVID response

• American Express acquired Resy in May 2019 for ~$200M
• Timing proved fortunate: COVID hit less than a year later, shutting the restaurant industry down
• Resy cut fees to zero during COVID; competitors followed
• Advanced marketing fees to restaurant partners to help cover payroll during closures
• Ben stayed on as CEO for 18 months post-acquisition, leaving in November 2020

Blackbird: a loyalty currency for restaurants

• Launched Blackbird Labs in 2023 — a coalition loyalty program across independent restaurants
• Diners earn points at any Blackbird-partnered restaurant and spend them at any other on the platform
• Points are backstopped with USD — restaurants can convert to cash at any time
• Priced cheaper than credit card processing fees to make adoption easy
• Resy makes money on the spread as points flow in and out of the system
• ~500 restaurants on the platform at time of recording
• Long-term goal: a global currency layer for the restaurant economy