Restaurant booking is the most stubbornly local corner of travel: a city's restaurants use whichever platform won that market, and the one you use at home is often invisible there. So the useful question is never which site is best — it is which one the restaurants where you are going actually list on. Below: the booking platforms by region, the guides worth trusting to pick the restaurant in the first place, and the tools for eating around a dietary restriction abroad.
Almost every restaurant sits on exactly one system. Check its own website or Instagram bio first; that link is the authoritative one, and the aggregators sometimes hold a smaller allocation than the restaurant's own page.
Tables open on a schedule — often 30 or 60 days ahead, frequently at midnight or 10am in the restaurant's local time zone. For a sought-after place, work out the exact moment in your own time zone and set an alarm; being one day late is the usual reason a booking fails.
Card details, a per-person prepayment or a full ticketed price are standard at the top end, and cancellation windows of 24 to 72 hours are enforced. Read what happens if your flight moves.
Most large booking platforms offer a cancellation notification or waitlist, and tables free up constantly. Set alerts for several nights rather than refreshing one.
In much of southern Europe, Latin America and Asia the answer is a phone call, a WhatsApp message, or turning up — and a hotel concierge calling in the local language succeeds where a form fails.
These six 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. Where offered, cancellation alerts are a real advantage: tell the service the date and party size and it will notify you when someone releases a table.
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.
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.
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.
Built for restaurants and wineries that sell ordinary tables alongside prepaid experiences and ticketed events. A venue can choose a free booking, card hold, deposit or full prepayment, and sets its own cancellation terms — so read the policy on the specific listing. It is especially useful for tasting menus, chef's counters and winery visits.
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.
Berlin-based and currently operating in eleven countries, with particularly useful coverage in Germany, Austria and Switzerland plus Italy, the Netherlands, Finland, Turkey, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore. In the German-speaking countries it lists everyday neighbourhood restaurants that the largest international platforms often skip.
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'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.
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.
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.
The foreign-visitor route into South Korea's largest reservation and waitlist network. Restaurant details and domestic reviews are translated, and travellers can reserve without a Korean phone number and pay deposits with an overseas-issued card. The separate Korean app still has deeper local inventory, while Naver handles a further slice of bookings.
An English-language booking and rewards platform currently focused on Singapore, Bangkok, Phuket, Jakarta and Bali. It is strongest for city restaurants and hotel dining rooms, and its rewards and dining offers can make it useful beyond simply holding the table.
A reservation platform built around time-based discounts of up to 50% at quieter hours. It covers Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, the Philippines and Taiwan, from hotel restaurants to casual chains, and the discount is attached to the booking rather than requiring a voucher purchase.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Formerly World's 50 Best Restaurants, the ranking is voted by more than 1,100 chefs, restaurateurs, writers and well-travelled diners, with regional editions for Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa, and North America. It rewards originality and influence rather than consistency, so a high placing can make reservations disappear immediately.
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.
A French project that compiles more than 1,100 expert sources and millions of online reviews into a single score per restaurant, covering 200 countries. Because it blends several juries rather than applying one, it reaches far more places than any individual guide — useful where none of the famous guides operates.
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.
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-by-city food journalism with local editors, best known for the Eater 38 lists of restaurants that define a city and regularly refreshed maps for specific cuisines, neighbourhoods and occasions. Strongest across United States cities, with current travel guides for London and other international destinations as well.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A human-reviewed directory of more than 55,000 halal restaurants, grocers and prayer spaces across 100-plus countries. Listings distinguish fully and partially halal menus, note certifying authorities where known, flag alcohol service, and add community reviews — the details a generic “halal” filter usually leaves out.
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