Booking a Table — Multi-Country Platforms
These four cover the most ground, but none is universal, and coverage is uneven inside a single country — a platform can be everywhere in the capital and absent two hours away. Their real advantage over calling is the notification: tell them the date and party size and they will alert you when someone cancels.
Owned by American Express and weighted towards the restaurants that are hard to get into — chef-driven, newly opened, critically covered. Deepest in United States cities, with a growing presence in London and a few European capitals. Its Notify alerts are effective because the inventory turns over quickly, and some Amex cards unlock reserved tables that are otherwise invisible.
United States
Canada
United Kingdom
Europe
The broadest single network, spanning neighbourhood restaurants and hotel dining rooms as well as destination ones — which is what makes it useful outside big cities, where the curated platforms list nothing. Owned by Booking Holdings, so it also appears inside Booking.com and KAYAK. Points earned per booking convert to restaurant credit slowly enough to be beside the point.
Worldwide
TripAdvisor-owned and the default across continental Europe, trading as ElTenedor in Spain and holding the largest listing base in France and Italy. Routinely carries percentage discounts on the bill at quieter times, which is unusual — most platforms sell the table, this one also sells the deal. Also operates in Australia.
France
Spain
Italy
Europe
Australia
Built for restaurants that sell a seat like a theatre ticket — you pay the tasting menu in advance and the booking is non-refundable or transferable rather than cancellable. That model concentrates the world's tasting-menu restaurants and many wineries here, so for a destination dinner it is often the only place the table exists. Budget for paying months ahead.
United States
Europe
Worldwide
Not a booking platform, but the one place every restaurant on earth has a listing, with a Reserve button that hands off to whichever local system it uses — which is the fastest way to discover that a city runs on a platform you have never heard of. Also the most reliable source of current opening hours, which the booking sites frequently get wrong.
Worldwide
Reservations · Europe · Asia
Berlin-based, strongest in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, with coverage in Italy, the Netherlands, Singapore, Hong Kong and Australia. In the German-speaking countries it lists everyday neighbourhood restaurants that the international platforms skip — exactly the places worth eating in on a longer stay.
Germany
Austria
Switzerland
Asia
Booking a Table — Country Specialists
In these countries the local platform is not an alternative to the international ones — it is where the restaurants are. Several expect a local phone number or ID, which is the single most common wall a visitor hits; where an English-language route exists it is noted below, and where it doesn't, a hotel concierge is the workaround.
Japan · Reviews + booking
Japan's dominant restaurant database, and the country's real quality signal: its ratings are compressed, so anything above roughly 3.5 out of 5 is genuinely good and above 3.8 is exceptional — a scale that surprises visitors used to inflated five-star systems. The English site covers a subset; booking often still requires a Japanese phone number.
Japan
The most visitor-friendly way into Japanese restaurants — an English interface, no Japanese phone number required, and used by a large number of hotel restaurants and mid-to-high-end independents in Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka. When a Japanese restaurant can be booked online from abroad at all, this is frequently the system behind it.
Japan
American Express-owned and aimed squarely at foreign visitors booking Japan's top tables — sushi counters, kaiseki, restaurants that traditionally accept introductions only. Prepaid in advance, in English, with the language barrier handled. A short list at high prices, and for some of these rooms the only route in.
Japan
South Korea's main reservation app, holding most of Seoul's sought-after restaurants, with tables typically released on a fixed day and filled within minutes. Korean-language and generally expecting a Korean phone number, so a local contact or a hotel concierge is usually the practical route for a visitor. Naver handles a further slice of bookings.
South Korea
The reservation platform of record across Singapore, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta and Bali, in English throughout and accepting foreign cards. It also sells discounted dining vouchers, which in Singapore in particular take a real bite out of a bill that is otherwise expensive by regional standards.
Singapore
Hong Kong
Thailand
Indonesia
China's restaurant review and booking platform, part of Meituan, and effectively the only comprehensive listing of where to eat in a Chinese city. Chinese-language, tied to a local payment method, and hard to use as a visitor without help — but worth having someone search it for you, because the international platforms list almost nothing.
China
India's main restaurant reservation platform, covering Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru and the other major cities, with same-day discounts attached to a large share of bookings. Zomato is the bigger name in the country but is oriented around delivery and reviews; for actually holding a table this is the one restaurants use.
India
United Arab Emirates
Bahrain-founded and the reservation system behind a large share of restaurants across the Gulf — Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Doha, Riyadh and Bahrain — in English and accepting foreign cards. In a region where hotel restaurants dominate the fine-dining scene, it covers most of them.
United Arab Emirates
Qatar
Saudi Arabia
Bahrain
Spain · Portugal · Latin America
Spanish, and the booking engine sitting behind an enormous number of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American restaurants — including many of the region's best, which take reservations only through their own site. You rarely search it directly; you meet it when you click Reservar on a restaurant's page, which is precisely why the restaurant's own website is the link to follow.
Spain
Portugal
Mexico
Latin America
Deciding Where to Eat — Guides & Rankings
Each of these is a different jury, and knowing whose opinion you are reading matters more than the score. Michelin sends anonymous inspectors against a fixed set of criteria; the ranked lists are voted on by industry panels and reward ambition and novelty; the national guides apply their own scales. None of them covers cheap and ordinary eating well — that is what the city critics further down are for.
Anonymous inspectors judging food alone — stars for cooking of a high standard, and the more useful Bib Gourmand for good food at a modest price, which is where the guide earns its keep for ordinary travellers. Coverage is limited to the regions it has chosen to enter, so an unstarred city may simply never have been visited rather than judged and found wanting.
Europe
United States
Japan
Asia
Voted by a large international panel of chefs, writers and well-travelled diners, with regional editions for Asia, Latin America and the Middle East and Africa. It rewards originality and influence rather than consistency, so it surfaces restaurants Michelin is slower to recognise — and books out the moment a list is published.
Worldwide
Europe · Scored out of 20
A French guide scoring restaurants out of 20 and historically friendlier to modern, less formal cooking than Michelin. Strongest in France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Benelux countries, where it frequently rates places the red guide has not reached — a useful second opinion in exactly those markets.
France
Germany
Austria
Benelux
A French project that aggregates hundreds of guides and review sources into a single score per restaurant, across more than 200 countries. Because it averages several juries rather than applying one, it reaches far more places than any individual guide — useful for a country where none of the famous guides operates.
Worldwide
Pizza · Italy & worldwide
An Italian ranking of pizzerias, with world, European and United States editions, judged by anonymous visits. Narrow by design and genuinely authoritative within it — the fastest way to avoid the tourist-strip pizza in Naples, Rome or New York and find the place locals queue at instead.
Italy
Europe
United States
Deciding Where to Eat — City Critics & Crowds
Guides rank the top of the market; these cover the rest of it, which is most of what you will actually eat. The pattern that works is to cross two sources — a local critic for what is good, and a crowd platform for whether it is still open and what the queue is like at 8pm on a Friday.
City guides · United States
City-by-city food journalism with local editors, and two formats worth knowing: the Eater 38, an evergreen list of the restaurants that define a city, and the constantly refreshed heatmap of where to eat right now. Strongest across United States cities, with London coverage as well. Written for residents, which is what makes it reliable.
United States
United Kingdom
Reviews written around the question people actually ask — where to take a group of six, where to eat alone at the bar, where to go after a show — with a numeric score and no advertising in the reviews. Covers major United States cities plus London. Its guides by situation are more useful on a trip than any ranked list.
United States
United Kingdom
Crowd reviews · Worldwide
Enormous review volume in every country, which is both its use and its weakness: rankings skew towards restaurants that serve visitors, so the top of a city list is often the tourist trap rather than the good room. Read it for practical detail — whether the terrace is real, whether they take cards, how long the wait was — rather than for the ranking.
Worldwide
Crowd reviews · United States
Still the deepest review base for everyday United States restaurants — the diner, the taqueria, the strip-mall place with no website — where the national publications and international platforms have nothing. Its waitlist feature also shows live queue times in some cities. Coverage outside North America is thin enough to ignore.
United States
Canada
City guides · International
Locally edited food and drink coverage for around forty cities worldwide, including many that Eater and The Infatuation do not reach — Lisbon, Barcelona, Tokyo, Melbourne, Buenos Aires. Its best-restaurants-in-{city} lists are updated rather than left to rot, which separates them from most travel listicles.
Worldwide
Eating with a Dietary Restriction
A restriction that is routine at home can be genuinely difficult in a country whose staple dishes are built around it, and mainstream platforms filter for cuisine, not for what you cannot eat. These are the tools built for the problem — plus one habit worth adopting: carry a printed translation card explaining the restriction in the local language, because kitchens understand a card in a way they do not understand a conversation at the pass.
A crowd-maintained global directory of vegan and vegetarian restaurants, plus ordinary places with reliable options, in over 180 countries — including small towns where nothing else lists anything. The distinction between fully vegan, vegetarian and veg-friendly is marked on each entry, which is the detail that decides whether a place is actually usable.
Worldwide
Reviews written by people with coeliac disease rather than by people avoiding gluten by choice, which is the difference that matters — the reviews discuss dedicated fryers, separate prep areas and staff understanding. Strongest in the United States and Europe; Italy is unusually well served, since coeliac diagnosis and certified restaurants are widespread there.
United States
Europe
Worldwide