Take it from event profs: Once you’re in the hospitality industry, it’s difficult to get out. Just ask Nick Cianfaglione, the serial entrepreneur who couldn’t help but sell off his previous ventures to start up Restaurent, the so-called “OpenTable or Airbnb for private events.”
Everyone knows these ubiquitous platforms. OpenTable is the online restaurant reservation service that notoriously tells users to contact the venue directly if they need to make a reservation for a party larger than six. And while Airbnb’s marketplace for short- and long-term home stays could make for a memorable vacation, good luck sourcing something that includes F&B, vendors, or staff.
Cue Restaurent, which aims to be a blend of the two and offer everything else an event prof would need on a website (and forthcoming app).
Restaurent launched on April 1, built on the belief that “people should be able to book more than a table at their favorite bars, restaurants, breweries, and beyond—where somebody can just go to our platform, say what kind of event they’re hosting, and find a venue that’s readily available and fits their criteria,” Cianfaglione said.
Like making a reservation online, users fill in the desired location, date, and time for their event. Available filters also allow planners to select a type of venue—and options are as general as restaurant, hotel, and golf course or as niche as mansion, botanical garden, and barn.
Cianfaglione touts his startup as the “OpenTable or Airbnb for private events" as it's an all-in-one platform for event profs to request a venue booking.Photo: Courtesy of Restaurent
The free-to-use site will then generate a list of venues that fit the criteria based on their portfolio, which currently spans about 150 venues in Rhode Island—where it’s headquartered—Boston, and Austin, Texas.
Austin may seem like an outlier city, but Cianfaglione ensured it was included along with the initial Northeastern locales because of its appeal for foodies and eventgoers. “It’s also a massive startup ecosystem,” he said, which makes Restaurent’s “lean and mean” team of four feel right at home.
Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and New York are currently in the works, set to be launched within the next 18 months, Cianfaglione said, noting that Restaurent is currently welcoming about 100 new venues each month, “on a rocket ship to be at about 500 venues by the end of the year.”
Venue listings include information like capacity data, pricing, photos, ideal events for the space, and a point of contact. From there, users are required to fill out a long-form questionnaire as part of a vetting process before submitting a booking request, which is then either approved or denied by the venue.
“We’re going to continuously add features that benefit users, such as adding automatic deposits to our platform so people can't cancel reservations last minute through us,” Cianfaglione assured. “It’s just another piece to make sure that when somebody's booking an event with us, they're serious about booking that event.”
Restaurent also doesn’t make a venue more expensive for its users. "If anything, booking through Restaurent might actually—in the long term—be cheaper, especially for repetitive corporate organizers or event planners,” Cianfaglione explained. "We have an internal concierge program where we work with people who book more than 10 events a year, and we can help you negotiate better rates for venues because of how many events they’re able to get through our platform."
Restaurent assists planners by providing imagery, capacity data, pricing, and other helpful points of information event profs want to know when conducting their site selection.Photo: Courtesy of Restaurent
The payment model instead relies on the venues themselves, which pay a flat rate of $50 per month to be on the platform, but the perks for these spaces seem equally too good to be true.
“We know how screwy the whole technology space is for restaurant technology,” Cianfaglione said.
He continued: “A lot of that means additional fees on the user and additional fees on the restaurant. The problem with that is if we take 10% of the sale, restaurants only make about 10%-15% margins on a private event booking. We don’t want to dig into any of their transactional margins.”
Speaking of transactional, a venue agreeing to pay Restaurent’s monthly fee is beyond a simple credit card swipe. Rather, it creates a working relationship with “a lot of different services” on offer.
For example: “We offer photography services and can have someone come in and shoot Instagram Reels,” Cianfaglione said. “We really want to make sure that they are not just signing up and just listing but rather that their venue looks good, and that we are actually marketing their space for them. We are—to some extent—their marketing partner within the private event space.”
Also before joining the platform, venues are put through Restaurent’s sales funnel in a process that screens plausible event sites before getting added to Restaurent’s portfolio.
Restaurent is a "lean and mean" team of four, Cianfaglione said, vetting venues with a sales funnel that includes talking to venue staff on a daily bases.Photo: Courtesy of Restaurent
“I’m a sales guy at heart, so I'm actually out there selling and talking to venues on a daily basis,” Cianfaglione said of the hands-on vetting process. “It’s a lot of ground-level work with the venue owners. I work with their team and really make sure they're a good fit for our platform and that they have good, rentable space,” he added.
As Restaurent grows, Cianfaglione said he hopes to extend into “every single town, community, and state across the country.”
“I want to touch all major areas of the country within the next five years,” he said of Restaurent, which is the culmination of pain points Cianfaglione noticed and sought to fix throughout his decadelong experience working in the hospitality industry—which began “about 10 years ago hosting events at nightclubs.”
He later got even more ingrained in the industry, hosting events for founders and investors local to Rhode Island, where Cianfaglione lives.
Although the event that pushed him to finally take the step to launch Restaurent was the death of his two grandparents in May 2022. “Being in events, my family was like, ‘Hey, Nick, go figure out the funeral receptions.’ It was at that point that I realized I knew a lot of nightclub owners and people in the brewery space, but I didn’t know where to go to host a celebration of life.”
He continued: “Traditionally, you could ask funeral homes for recommendations in the area, and they can refer you to. But I realized that that whole industry—even for the average event planner, or the person who's planning a couple of events a year—was completely fragmented and broken.”
“Whatever the event is, what is the best venue within this radius, within this budget, with these amenities that’s available on the date I need it?” Cianfaglione asked. “And that’s really what we’re fixing here.”
Restaurent is free to use for planners and $50 per month for venues. There are currently 150 venues on the platform, with plans to reach 500 by the end of the year.Screenshot: Shannon Thaler/BizBash
