How Quenelle Works

Overview

What is Quenelle?

Quenelle is a personal dining assistant that helps you discover and secure restaurant reservations without constantly checking booking apps. Just text whenever you want a restaurant. Quenelle finds what’s available, tells you what’s worth going to, and if something’s booked, watches it until a table opens up.

Vocabulary

Watch, Auto-Book, Snipe

Three words do most of the work on this page, and they mean three different things. They are separate mechanisms with separate platform support, so it’s worth thirty seconds to get them straight.

Quick Start Guide

Everything you can do

Just text like you’d message a friend. Here’s everything Quenelle can do:

Sign Up

Sign up in seconds

Getting started with Quenelle is simple: no app to download, no forms to fill out. Here’s how it works:

Quenelle works entirely over iMessage and SMS. There’s no app to download and no dashboard to manage. Your dining assistant lives in your messages.

Core Feature

Texting Quenelle

Send a message the same way you’d text a friend. Quenelle understands natural language, with no commands or syntax to learn.

Example requests

What happens next

Quenelle checks major reservation platforms in parallel and surfaces what’s worth going to: not just what’s technically available, but what matches your ask. You’ll get a text back with options and direct booking links.

You confirm and book directly on the platform. You stay in control of your reservation at all times.

Core Feature

Availability Search

Every text you send to Quenelle triggers a live availability search: not a cache, not a curated shortlist, but a real-time sweep across all major reservation platforms at once. Most diners search platform by platform. Quenelle does it all in a single message.

One request, cross-platform coverage

Resy, OpenTable, SevenRooms, Wisely, Yelp, DesignMyNight, and Zenchef: Quenelle queries them all simultaneously and surfaces what’s actually available for your party size and date. You won’t miss a table just because it happens to be on a different platform. Tock is the exception — its availability isn’t machine-readable to us, so Tock is waitlist registration only.

What the search considers

If nothing comes back, Quenelle can automatically set a watch and alert you the moment something opens up. No need to keep checking.

Core Feature

Monitoring

For hard-to-book spots, Quenelle doesn’t check once and give up. It watches continuously and alerts you the moment a table opens. Monitoring runs on a dedicated always-on service, not a scheduled job that wakes up every few minutes.

Polling cadence is demand-weighted: the more people waiting on a given restaurant and party size, the faster it gets checked.

Hour-aligned sweeps

Restaurants overwhelmingly release inventory on the hour. OpenTable and SevenRooms sweeps pull forward so the next check lands 45 seconds before the top of the hour in New York, rather than somewhere random in the interval.

Drop-gate prewarm

When a restaurant has a known release schedule, its watches are held out of the general rotation until ten minutes before the drop, then run hot straight through it.

Why you don’t get spammed

Naive monitors re-alert every time they see the same table. Quenelle tracks an availability episode per request: an episode opens when inventory matching your window appears, and only closes after two confirmed empty reads at least five minutes apart. You get one alert per genuine open-and-close cycle, not one per poll.

A provider error is never treated as “no availability.” A failed read leaves your episode state untouched instead of closing it and re-alerting you when the platform recovers.

How it works for you

Core Feature

Auto-Book

Connect a booking account and a watch becomes a booking. Instead of texting you when a table opens, Quenelle takes it — no link to tap, no window to miss. Auto-Book requires an active Quenelle membership.

Connect Resy

Connect OpenTable

Making an Auto-Book request

Once set up, just text your request and include Auto-Book. For example: “Monitor and set up Auto-Book for Carbone this Saturday for 2 between 5:00 and 10:00 PM.” Quenelle will watch for availability and book automatically the moment a match opens.

Money is disclosed before it’s authorized

When you arm Auto-Book on a venue that charges up front, Quenelle reads the venue’s published terms and sends you the number before anything is armed:

That disclosed amount becomes a hard ceiling. At booking time the system re-reads the live charge and refuses to book if the real amount exceeds what you were quoted, if the refund terms turn out worse than disclosed, or if the venue or party size doesn’t match. It asks you instead.

It refuses standing authority on real risk

If a venue’s charge is always non-refundable and over $100 for your party, Quenelle will not accept standing Auto-Book at all. The request downgrades to a watch, and when a table opens you get the exact charge quoted and it books on your “yes.” That’s deliberate: nobody should have a $600 non-refundable charge fire off a rule they set two weeks ago.

The one question that survives

If a table opens inside the venue’s free-cancellation window, Quenelle confirms before booking even when the charge was already authorized. Whether a table opens inside that window is genuinely unknowable at setup, so it stays a live question.

OpenTable cancellation policies

OpenTable does not expose booking policies to automated clients. For venues where we’ve recorded the terms directly, Auto-Book proceeds on the recorded policy. For venues we haven’t recorded, Quenelle confirms with you before booking rather than committing to terms it can’t read.

Who pays

Deposits, per-person charges, and cancellation fees are charged by the restaurant through your own connected Resy or OpenTable account. Quenelle discloses them and holds them to the quoted ceiling, but does not cover or reimburse them.

Core Feature

Release Snipes

Some restaurants don’t trickle out tables — they release a whole month at a fixed time, and it’s gone in seconds. A snipe is a job armed against that release time. It doesn’t poll and wait to notice; it fires at the drop second with your request already staged.

We’d rather say that plainly than imply parity. On a genuinely competitive release, continuous watching loses to a drop-second grab, and we’re not going to pretend otherwise.

Example requests

Good details to include

Early Access

Hit Lists

Most concierges make you re-type the same twelve restaurants. Quenelle takes the list once and treats it as a real object you can search against and monitor as a unit.

Give it a list

Paste one. Any shape — commas, newlines, numbered, with neighborhoods or addresses attached. The parser handles the formatting; you don’t have to clean it up.

A public Google Maps saved list works too — Quenelle flattens the places into your list. Pasting is always additive. Replacing your whole list requires you to actually say so, so a re-paste can never silently delete anything. Hit Lists currently hold up to 100 restaurants.

Operate on it

Search it

That scopes the availability search to your list only. “Don’t use my list for this” scopes it back out. The scope sticks across follow-ups like “show me more” and “make it 7:30” instead of silently widening back to the whole city.

Monitor it

Quenelle freezes a snapshot of your list and opens a watch per resolved restaurant. Editing your list afterwards does not silently add or drop live watches — they’re pinned to exact restaurants at creation time.

Honest failure modes

A name we can’t resolve is stored as unresolved, not guessed into the wrong restaurant. A restaurant we can identify but can’t monitor is reported as unsupported. A wrong binding is worse than an admitted miss, so we don’t make one:

Core Feature

Waitlist Requests

For restaurants that run on SevenRooms or Tock, Quenelle can add you directly to the waitlist with one message. Most people never bother, which is exactly why it works.

Waitlists convert more often than their reputation suggests, particularly the day before or the morning of. When a table opens, the restaurant contacts you directly by email. No app to check, no platform to monitor. You’re just already in line.

Example requests

How it works

Integrations

Supported Platforms

A single text to Quenelle checks across every reservation system below at once. Coverage is per-platform and enforced in code, not aspirational: if a platform can’t do something, the concierge tells you instead of failing quietly.

Personalization

Preferences & Learning

Quenelle gets smarter the more you use it. After a few interactions, it starts building a picture of your dining preferences (cuisine, neighborhood, ambiance, price point) and uses that context to surface better recommendations without you having to spell everything out.

Think of it like Spotify for restaurants. The signal builds quietly in the background, and the experience gradually becomes more tailored to you. When you want to be explicit instead of inferred, that’s what a Hit List is for.

What Quenelle learns

Pricing

Simple, flat pricing

Quenelle is a subscription service at $15/month. No tiers, no per-booking fees, no surprises. Every feature, including monitoring, cross-platform search, release snipes, and Auto-Book, is included.

FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions