Joel Montaniel’s SevenRooms is more than just another restaurant reservation system. “If you ask a restaurant, ‘What are your top 10, your top 25, and your top 50 customers?’ There are 15 million restaurants on the planet and 14.95 million of them can’t answer that question today,” Montaniel said. SevenRooms set out to solve that problem—by offering a suite of tools that empower restaurants and other types of hospitality operators to take full control and make the best use of their customer data.

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“Basically what Shopify has been doing for retail is what we’re doing for restaurants,” Montaniel explained. “We help restaurants do three things: make money, build relationships with their customers, and then streamline their operations.”

Montaniel, a former investment banker and real estate investor, founded SevenRooms in 2011 with his childhood friend Kinesh Patel and former Credit Suisse colleague Allison Page. Inspired by the former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter‘s “seven rooms theory,” the company aspires to create spaces where patrons feel at home, regardless of the venue’s exclusivity. From high-end establishments to smaller independent eateries, SevenRooms caters to a diverse range of hospitality operators, boasting an impressive clientele of more than 11,000 hospitality operators around the world.

Montaniel was named on Observer’s 2023 Nightlife Dining Power List. We interviewed Montaniel earlier this month about SevenRooms’ founding story, his journey of finding the right business model, and the broader landscape of the hospitality industry amid high inflation and shifting consumer behavior. The following conversation has been edited for........

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