OpenTable Restaurants & Reviews Scraper

---

🎯 What this scrapes

OpenTable is the default reservation platform for tens of thousands of restaurants across the US and beyond. This Actor collects one structured row per restaurant for a searched city: price tier, overall and sub-category star ratings, review count, a booking-popularity signal, contact details, and a capped set of recent review snippets — built to feed local-restaurant SaaS tools, franchise/competitive-intel research, and site-selection analysis.

🔥 What we handle for you

• 🌐 Residential proxy rotation via Apify Proxy — fresh session and exit IP on every block.
• 🔁 Retries with exponential backoff on 408 / 429 / 5xx — up to 5 attempts per page, Retry-After honoured.
• 🧱 Rate-limit-aware pacing — when the target pushes back, we slow down instead of getting banned.
• 🧊 Consistently structured dataset rows — validated fields, ISO-8601 timestamps, stable IDs, JSON / CSV / Excel export straight from the Apify Console.
• 💰 Pay-Per-Event pricing — a small start fee per run, then you pay only for results that hit your dataset. A run that finds nothing pays only the start fee.

💡 Use cases

• Local-restaurant SaaS — keep a client-facing dataset of competitor listings, price tiers, and ratings current for a target metro.
• Franchise / competitive-intel research — compare cuisine mix, price tiers, and booking-popularity signals across a city or neighborhood.
• Site-selection analysis — map restaurant density, price tiers, and ratings for a candidate location before opening a new site.
• Reputation monitoring — track review counts and recent review snippets for a watchlist of restaurants over time.

⚙️ How to use it

1. Click Try for free at the top of the page.
2. Fill in the input form — most fields have sensible defaults.
3. Click Start. Output streams into the run's dataset.
4. Export from Storage → Dataset as JSON, CSV, or Excel — or fetch via the API.

📥 Input

Field	Type	Required	Default	Notes
location	string	yes	'New York, NY'	City or neighborhood to search on OpenTable, e.g. "New York, NY", or a city-listing slug.
cuisine	string	no	'Italian'	Optional cuisine filter, e.g. "Italian".
maxResults	integer	no	100	Maximum number of restaurants to return in this run.
includeReviews	boolean	no	True	Populate the reviews field on each row with recent review snippets.
maxReviewsPerRestaurant	integer	no	5	Cap on review snippets collected per restaurant when Include reviews is on.
proxyConfiguration	object	yes	{'useApifyProxy': True, 'apifyProxyGroups': ['RESIDENTIAL']}	Mandatory — defaults to RESIDENTIAL given OpenTable's site-wide bot-defense wall on non-residential IPs.

Example input

{
  "location": "New York, NY",
  "maxResults": 3,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": true,
    "apifyProxyGroups": [
      "RESIDENTIAL"
    ]
  }
}

📤 Output

Every row is one dataset item.

Field	Type	Notes
query_location	string	Original location input for this row.
restaurant_name	string	Listing/detail page title.
opentable_url	string	Canonical https://www.opentable.com/r/
opentable_id	['string', 'null']	Internal numeric/slug ID, if exposed (unconfirmed).
city	string	Parsed from location or the listing page.
neighborhood	['string', 'null']	Neighborhood name (unconfirmed).
cuisines	array	Cuisine tags on the listing/detail page.
price_tier	['string', 'null']	OpenTable's $–$$$$ symbol tier.
rating_overall	['number', 'null']	1–5 aggregate star rating.
rating_food	['number', 'null']	Food sub-score (unconfirmed).
rating_service	['number', 'null']	Service sub-score (unconfirmed).
rating_ambience	['number', 'null']	Ambience sub-score (unconfirmed).
review_count	['integer', 'null']	Total review count on the listing.
booked_today_count	['integer', 'null']	"Booked N times today" popularity badge (unconfirmed).
phone	['string', 'null']	Contact number on the detail page.
address	['string', 'null']	Street address on the detail page.
reviews	array	Recent review snippets (author, rating, text, date — all nullable, unconfirmed), only when includeReviews=true, capped…
scraped_at	string	ISO 8601 UTC timestamp at row creation.

Example output

{
  "query_location": "New York, NY",
  "restaurant_name": "Gramercy Tavern",
  "opentable_url": "https://www.opentable.com/r/gramercy-tavern-new-york",
  "opentable_id": null,
  "city": "New York",
  "neighborhood": "Flatiron District",
  "cuisines": [
    "American",
    "Contemporary American"
  ],
  "price_tier": "$$$",
  "rating_overall": 4.8,
  "rating_food": 4.9,
  "rating_service": 4.7,
  "rating_ambience": 4.8,
  "review_count": 6421,
  "booked_today_count": 37,
  "phone": "+1 212-477-0777",
  "address": "42 E 20th St, New York, NY 10003",
  "reviews": [
    {
      "author": "J.",
      "rating": 5.0,
      "text": "Exceptional service.",
      "date": "2026-07-28"
    }
  ],
  "scraped_at": "2026-08-02T12:00:00+00:00"
}

💰 Pricing

Pay-Per-Event — you pay only when these events fire:

Event	USD	What it is
actor-start	$0.20	One-off warm-up charge per run
result-row	$0.0015	Per unique dataset item

Example: 1 000 results at the rates above ≈ $1.70. No subscription, no minimum, no card to start — Apify gives every new account $5 of free credit.

🚧 Limitations

This scaffold-stage release ships input validation and the full output shape but does not yet push scraped rows — production fetching/parsing is gated on a cloud recon pass confirming OpenTable's live wire format (see the Actor's CHANGELOG). Live table-availability/booking-time search, making or managing reservations, and any authenticated diner-account view are out of scope.

❓ FAQ

Do I need an OpenTable account or API key?

No. This Actor scrapes OpenTable's own publicly listed restaurant data — no login, no API key.

Why does this default to a residential proxy?

OpenTable runs a site-wide bot-defense wall that blocks direct/datacenter-IP requests. We default proxyConfiguration to Apify's RESIDENTIAL group so runs clear that wall without you tuning anything.

Can I filter by cuisine?

Yes — set cuisine (e.g. "Italian") alongside location.

Does every row include reviews?

Only when includeReviews is true (the default); reviews is capped at maxReviewsPerRestaurant per row.

💬 Your feedback

Spotted a bug, hit a weird edge case, or need a new field? Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab on Apify Console — we ship fixes weekly and we read every report.

---