Every restaurant should be as easy to book as the chain down the road.
Think about how people actually choose where to eat now. They search. Sometimes for a name they half remember, sometimes just for the town they happen to be standing in. Either way they end up looking at a Google listing — photos, opening hours, a handful of reviews, a pin on a map.
If that listing belongs to a large chain, there is a button on it. Reserve a table. Pick a time, tap twice, done.
If it belongs to an independent, usually there is not. There is a phone number. Which is a perfectly good thing at eleven in the morning, and a useless one at nine at night, when the person deciding where to eat is stood on a wet pavement with four per cent battery and two hungry friends.
That gap has never had anything to do with how good the restaurant is. It is a technical integration. It is expensive to build, it takes a formal partnership with Google to be allowed to build it at all, and the platforms that already have it have been in no hurry whatsoever to hand it to everybody else.
We are building it. And when it lands, it will be there for every restaurant on NomNom — the fifteen-cover bistro exactly the same as the group with eleven sites.
What your guests will see
Someone searches for you, or comes across you on the map while they are looking for somewhere near enough to walk to. Your listing shows a Reserve a table button.
They choose a party size and a time from your real availability — not a guess, not a request form that someone has to answer in the morning — and they confirm. That is the whole thing.
The booking appears in your diary straight away, with a table already allocated, exactly as though it had come through your own booking page. Because as far as your diary is concerned, it did.
No app to download. No account to create. Nothing to wait for.
What you will have to do
Nothing.
That is not a turn of phrase. Your opening times, your tables, your turn lengths, your online booking rules — the ones you have already set up and already trust — are exactly what Google will show. Close a Tuesday and the Tuesday disappears. Stop taking online bookings after nine and nine is where it stops. Put a table out of service and it stops being offered.
There is no second diary to keep, no availability to re-enter, and nothing new to learn. A booking that arrives through Google is just a booking.
The part we care most about
The usual way to get that button onto your listing is to join one of the large booking platforms and pay them a commission on every cover that comes through it.
Think about what that actually means. The busier you get, the more it costs. Forever. On diners who searched for your restaurant, by name, and were always coming to you anyway.
We are not going to do that. Being bookable from Google will be part of NomNom, with nothing charged per cover and nothing charged per booking. Your price stays your price, whether the button sends you four covers in a month or four hundred.
Where we have actually got to
The honest answer is: not finished.
We are an approved Google booking partner, and we are part of the way through the technical certification that turns that approval into a live button on your listing. Your availability is already flowing to Google. Bookings, changes and cancellations all work end to end in Google’s test environment — made from a real Google listing, moved, cancelled, and landing correctly in a real diary each time.
What is left is the production sign-off and Google’s own review of the finished integration. We will tell you the day it goes live, and we would rather tell you then than promise you now.
Why we think this matters
For a long time the biggest advantage the large groups had over everybody else was not better food, or better service, or better rooms. It was simply being easier to book.
They were on the platforms. They were in the search results. They had the button. And the independent forty yards down the same street had a phone that rang out through service, and a Tuesday that could have been full.
That advantage is about to stop being an advantage.