Skip waiting for a table, your food, or the check at restaurants with this new tool
When I opened up the platform in Messenger, I hit "Order Now" and was subsequently prompted to enter either an address or zip code.
From there, nine restaurants, all within a mile from our office address popped up. I scrolled to the right to survey the options.
All of the restaurants appear to be in the middle to higher-end price range. I really appreciated that the address and distance from my location of each restaurant was readily available.
On top of that, I could click on the "Open map" feature and a new tab opened with the various routes to the restaurant and the estimated travel time for each route, courtesy of Google Maps.
Skip waiting for a table, your food, or the check at restaurants with this new tool
The ordering process took a little trial and error as I tried to navigate the foreign platform.
After I selected an restaurant, I was prompted to say when and for how many people I was booking lunch.
After you choose a restaurant, there are ten "hand-curated meals" to choose from, but the bot offers that the restaurant's entire menu can be viewed in-app.
The images of the select entrees are beautiful.
I recruited two coworkers to make a lunch reservation through Allset with me. From the selection of restaurants, we agreed on Bo’s Kitchen & Bar Room and placed two orders of burgers.
Placing the order actually took a lot of back and forth between my coworkers. As my coworker leaned over my desk to take a look at the entrees himself, I started to doubt the app's claims to improving lunch time efficiency. But, when I reserved a table for three, the messaging bot did say that using the Allset app instead would allow everyone to book their orders independently. Good to know.
As I'm finishing the order, unexpected requests keep popping up. There ended up being too many for me to finish before I had to leave for a meeting. I left the screen open to the payment processing page, intending to book the order for 1:30 p.m. when I returned.
But when I came back and entered my card information, there seemed to be a glitch.
Frustrated, I started the order over.
By that time, Bo’s was no longer taking Allset lunch reservations so we had to start the entire process over and choose from one of the restaurants still available.
Paying attention to the price point, I tried to book another restaurant in the medium price range. We went with Italian — Chelsea Ristorante. The restaurant was more of a walk, about 14 minutes according to the map, but we booked it anyways. After we'd decided on our new entrees, I tried to make the payment once again.
But it still didn't go through. When I type "help," A customer service representative immediately enters the Messenger app for support. She suggests that I don't have enough money on my card, but I just checked. There was definitely enough money in my account. She then advises me to call my bank.
It took two phone calls to my bank to determine the problem with running my card. My banker informed me that the method the company was using to verify my debit card, rapidly firing and retrieving small increments of money before making the actual charge to my card, was tripping fraud alerts and freezing my account. Additionally, my banker noted that my card was limited to 12 transactions a day, and that the app was sending so many requests it was pushing it over that limit, also triggering fraud.
To be fair, I remember having a similar issue with the verification system used by Seamless when I tried to place an order through their app earlier this summer. So, if you use Seamless and it works perfectly for you, you should be in good shape to use Allset. These just happened to be the safety features on cards through my personal bank.
I messaged the Allset's customer service representative what my banker had said and she offered to hop on the phone with me to sort out the situation.
For our patience, she offered us a free meal. By that time, it was getting late in the day, and my coworkers had long ago lost interest in going to lunch with me, so we booked the order for noon the next day.
Just before we were about to leave for lunch the next day, some last-minute work came up, and it was nearly time for our reservation by the time we finished. So, a service like Allset is really for people who can really control their daily schedule. But I doubt many young professionals such as ourselves really have that flexibility.
It was nice to get outside and walk a few new streets of the city for lunch, and I like that the initial use of the service forced you to explore new restaurants and meals. It was a big improvement from my regular routine of ordering the same sandwich every day from the deli up the street.
The restaurant was directly across from Google, hi Google!
When we got to the restaurant a little after noon, it had only just opened, and didn’t have many other customers, so I don’t think we would have had trouble securing a table.
But, as promised, the appetizers and food were at our table minutes after we sat down. It was amazing.
The food was delicious and the service was excellent. Mouth watering lasagna.
And it was a breeze not having to wait for the check — the end of our meal was topped off with a small dessert delivered to our table, no anxiety waiting for a waiter to return to our table.
And it frees up the servers' time. They don’t have to take the order, they don’t have to bring us the check, or wait for us to slip a credit card into the bill fold. The manager at Chelsea Ristorante said he sees the service as both a positive for customers as well as the restaurant.
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