Who is behind GetTable

Why this service exists

Les Grands Buffets is fully booked months ahead. Yet tables free up every day: the restaurant asks for menus to be prepaid, and bookings left unsettled drop automatically 29 days before the meal. A second wave lands 11 days before, the last day to cancel and get the prepayment back. Between the two, isolated drop-outs happen constantly.

In other words, the seat exists. The problem is not availability, it is being in front of the screen at the right moment. Those seats go within minutes, often at night or in the middle of a working day, and nobody can refresh a booking site all day for weeks.

So I automated that watch: a program queries availability continuously, and sends you a text message as soon as a table matching your criteria appears. That is the whole service. There is no team, no office, no funding round: a server that looks on your behalf, and a text message when it is worth stopping what you are doing.

What GetTable does, and what it does not

• It alerts you. That is the service you buy, and the only one.
• It never books on your behalf. You do the booking, on the official Les Grands Buffets site, with your own account.
• It never asks for your login details at the restaurant, nor your card number: payment happens on a page hosted by Polar, who sells and invoices the order.
• It is affiliated with neither the restaurant nor anyone else. GetTable is an independent service. Les Grands Buffets is neither a partner nor aware of it, and I take no commission on your bookings.

What we observe, and what we publish of it

The program queries the same public availability as any visitor to the restaurant’s site: a date, a sitting, a number of guests, and an answer — free or full. Nothing else. No privileged access, no booking data, no contact with the restaurant.

Because these checks happen continuously, they end up telling something the official site does not show: when a seat reappears, and how long it stays bookable. We archive those transitions, with no personal data whatsoever, and publish the totals on the observed availability page, with their date, their method and their limits.

Two rules govern that publication, and they are not negotiable:

• No invented figure, ever. No estimated success rate, no reconstructed average delay, no fabricated review. When the sample is too thin for an average to mean anything, the page says so in plain words rather than showing a flattering percentage.
• No individual slot published. The dates watched are the ones customers asked me for: a precise date together with a party size would let one of them recognise themselves. Only totals come out.

What I commit to

If no alert was sent to you before the date you were aiming for, you are refunded in full, automatically, without having to ask. I also publish the real numbers of the service: watches that came to nothing are counted there like the rest, without which those figures would mean nothing.

And next?

GetTable watches only one restaurant today, Les Grands Buffets in Narbonne, and that is deliberate. Knowing a place well — its prepayment rules, its cancellation deadlines and the real rhythm of its availability — takes long observation. Other much-in-demand restaurants will follow. They are not available yet, and I will not announce them before I know how to watch them as well as this one.

A question, a doubt, a problem? Write to me directly at contact@gettable.fr. I am the one who answers.

An independent service, not affiliated with Les Grands Buffets.