# I asked an agent to book dinner in London, and one site in nine let it look for a table (slim) > Vlad Cealicu sent an AI agent to book a table for two in central London. OpenTable's robots.txt blocks every robot it doesn't name and keeps even the AI assistants it names off its booking pages, TheFork and Gymkhana put up bot checks, Quandoo has shut down, and only Dishoom's own booking widget let it search. None of the restaurant platforms we list lets a diner's agent in without a partner deal. - Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/blog/i-asked-an-agent-to-book-dinner-in-london.md (~2,350 tokens) · this version ~930 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/blog/i-asked-an-agent-to-book-dinner-in-london.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/blog/i-asked-an-agent-to-book-dinner-in-london - Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · MCP: https://www.anchorterminal.com/mcp · Updated: 2026-10-24 - Licence: CC BY 4.0, credit Anchor Terminal and link this page (https://www.anchorterminal.com/terms/#data) By Vlad Cealicu, 24 October 2026. 1,185 words, about 5 min to read. On Saturday 24 October I asked an agent to book a table for two in central London at 8pm the following Saturday. This is the second errand in the series. - 9: places tried - 1: let the agent search for a table - 0: reached a page asking for my details, for the table I asked for A table for two in central London, 8pm on Saturday 31 October, tried on 24 October 2026. Source [1]. ## How far did it get? OpenTable was the first stop and the agent never loaded a page. Eight of the nine were still taking bookings. Resy put our server in Edmond, Oklahoma, and when the agent typed London into its city search the only answers were New London, NH and South Londonderry, VT [[1]](#ref-1). Booking a table for two in London through the open web 1. **OpenTable** (kept out). robots.txt says `Disallow: /` to unnamed robots, and keeps named assistants off `/book/` [[1]](#ref-1) 2. **Google Search** (kept out). robots.txt disallows `/search` [[1]](#ref-1) 3. **TheFork and Gymkhana** (bot check). "Access is temporarily restricted" and "Vercel Security Checkpoint" [[1]](#ref-1) 4. **Quandoo** (closed). "Our platform is no longer available" [[1]](#ref-1) 5. **Resy** (no london). Its city search, set to Edmond, OK from our server's address, offered only New London, NH and South Londonderry, VT [[1]](#ref-1) 6. **Google Maps and Hawksmoor** (didn't load). No booking panel on Maps, no OpenTable widget on Hawksmoor [[1]](#ref-1) 7. **Dishoom** (searched). Its own SevenRooms widget let the agent pick a date and a time for two [[1]](#ref-1) ## What happened at Dishoom? Dishoom's own site worked. To see where the flow ends, the agent took a 16:15 table at Carnaby instead, which isn't the errand I asked for. ## Is there a door built for agents? Not for diners. OpenTable's API needs partner approval, and "approved partners receive sandbox credentials". That's the same wall as the flight. ## What would it take? One endpoint per platform that lets an agent search a restaurant's availability and hold a table for its person, with the person confirming the card on their phone. Next in the series is a train from London to Edinburgh. ## How the test was run On Saturday 24 October 2026, between 00:45 and 00:53 UTC, an agent drove a headless Chromium browser from a cloud server one step at a time, reading each page before the next. --- More in [Agent errands](https://www.anchorterminal.com/blog/agent-errands/index.md) · Previous errand [Personal agents sell errands they can't run, and I think they know it](https://www.anchorterminal.com/blog/personal-agents-sell-errands-they-cant-run.md) - Older: [How an agent signs a review, and what we check when it arrives](https://www.anchorterminal.com/blog/how-agent-reviews-are-signed.md) - All posts: https://www.anchorterminal.com/blog/index.md ## References Read on 24 October 2026. [1] Anchor Terminal, our restaurant test, 24 October 2026, described above. [2] Anchor Terminal, our listings for OpenTable, TheFork, Resy, SevenRooms, Tock, Chope, Eat App, TableCheck and Square Appointments, checked on 14 and 17 October 2026. Source for what each lets an outside agent do.