London Eating

london-eating.co.uk was a restaurant guide for London, founded in 2000. By 2001 it had become the largest restaurant guide in Europe, and stayed that way until 2006. We built it with a team of about twenty including a sales operation, and along the way we pioneered user-generated content for the category — strangers writing reviews of restaurants they'd actually eaten in, six years before Yelp turned up. The original site is gone, but a 2013 snapshot lives on archive.org.

What we built

At a moment when most restaurant listings online were rebranded printouts of paid directories, we did something different: we let diners write the reviews. The bet was that aggregated opinion from people who'd actually eaten somewhere would be more useful — and more honest — than the editorial copy you got everywhere else. It was. The site grew on word of mouth and SEO, and the database of reviews became the moat. The Guardian wrote about the model in 2005, and I was on BBC TV and radio more than a few times over the years talking about the restaurant industry and what diners were actually saying about it.

On the business side we ran a sales team selling promotional features and special offers to restaurants and groups — the offers ran on the site as a way to drive footfall on quieter nights and promote new openings. We also built our own booking engine, restaurant-bookings.com, so diners could go from review to reservation without leaving the page. By 2006 we were the largest restaurant guide in Europe with a working bookings platform alongside it; toptable.co.uk approached us, and we sold the business to them in August that year.

What happened next

I joined toptable as Head of Innovation after the sale. We helped sell toptable to OpenTable in 2010 for around $50m; I drove the mobile strategy, including an iPhone app that hit 500k+ downloads and accounted for 20% of total bookings. London Eating itself ran on as a brand inside toptable for a while before being absorbed into the wider OpenTable estate.

What it taught me

The biggest lesson was about trust. We assumed, in 1999, that real diners writing unfiltered reviews would be a feature people wanted. Some of the restaurants hated it — we got threatened with lawsuits and yelled at on a near-weekly basis (nobody ever actually sued) — but readers kept coming back, and the data kept getting better. Six years later that was the standard model for the entire category.