opentable-watcher-mcp

A watch-and-alert tool for OpenTable availability. You tell it a restaurant, a party size, and a window of dates/times you'd take a table; it polls quietly in the background and pings you the moment something opens up.

This tool does not and will not book anything for you. It watches, it alerts, and it hands you a deep link to the restaurant's booking page so a human clicks the final button. There is no booking automation anywhere in this codebase, on purpose.

It ships two ways to use it: an MCP server so you can manage watches by talking to Claude ("watch Restaurant X for 4 on the 12th between 6 and 8pm"), and a background daemon that keeps scanning even when Claude isn't running.

5-minute quickstart

1. Install it.

This tool drives a real Chromium browser under the hood (see How it works), so Playwright needs a browser binary on disk too. playwright install chromium isn't automatically on PATH after a uv tool install/pipx install (they isolate each tool in its own venv), so grab it explicitly in that same environment:

uv tool install opentable-watcher-mcp --with-executables-from playwright
playwright install chromium

--with-executables-from playwright puts playwright's own CLI on PATH alongside opentable-watcher so the second command works as shown. (A one-liner that does the same without a permanent install: uvx --from opentable-watcher-mcp playwright install chromium.)

Or with pipx:

pipx install opentable-watcher-mcp
~/.local/share/pipx/venvs/opentable-watcher-mcp/bin/playwright install chromium

(~/.local/share/pipx/venvs/opentable-watcher-mcp is pipx's default venv location for this package on Linux/macOS. If you've customized PIPX_HOME, or you're not sure, run pipx environment to see where pipx is actually looking.)

(PyPI publication is pending — until then, install straight from GitHub: uv tool install git+https://github.com/jtur671/opentable-watcher-mcp --with-executables-from playwright.)

2. Seed a trusted session.

opentable-watcher seed https://www.opentable.com/r/example-restaurant

This opens a real, visible Chrome window on that restaurant's page. Browse around until the available times render normally — that's it, no OpenTable login required (this is watch-only, so there's nothing to sign in for unless you want to). Once times are showing, switch back to the terminal and press Enter. The session cookies are saved locally and reused by everything else below.

3. Point Claude at it.

Add this to your claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "opentable-watcher": {
      "command": "opentable-watcher",
      "args": ["mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Or, for Claude Code:

claude mcp add opentable-watcher -- opentable-watcher mcp

See docs/mcp-config.md for both in full.

4. Ask Claude.

"Watch example-restaurant for 2 on 2027-03-01 between 5 and 8pm."

Claude will call add_watch, and from then on you can ask it to check status, look at recent matches, pause/resume, or remove the watch — all in plain English.

For scanning to keep happening while Claude isn't open, run the background daemon — see docs/daemon-setup.md.

How it works

OpenTable's availability API sits behind Akamai bot detection, which fingerprints the TLS/HTTP2 stack, client hints, and behavioral signals of whatever's talking to it. A plain HTTP client — requests, httpx, curl with a spoofed User-Agent — doesn't pass. The signature doesn't match a browser, no matter what headers you fake.

So this tool doesn't try to imitate a browser. It is one. seed opens a real, persistent Chrome profile and has a human browse it, which lets Akamai's own sensor JS validate the session the normal way. From then on, every availability check runs as an in-page fetch() call executed inside that same trusted tab — same cookies, same CSRF token, same TLS fingerprint the site already approved. It's the restaurant page's own GraphQL query, asked from the restaurant page itself, just automated on a timer instead of a mouse.

The tradeoff is that this only works with a real, visible browser (see Troubleshooting — headless is a giveaway). It's slower and heavier than a scraper, but it's the only approach that survives Akamai without spoofing anything.

Politeness (built in, not configurable down)

• 30-second floor between requests to the same restaurant. Watches can't be created with a tighter interval.
• 5 watches max, active at once, across the whole tool.
• One request in flight at a time — scans go one restaurant, one date, one fetch at a time; nothing runs concurrently.

These aren't suggestions you can turn off — they're enforced by the store and the scanner. The goal is a tool that looks, to OpenTable, exactly like one household checking dinner plans a little more often than a person would refresh a tab. Not a scraper.

How results are ranked: when a scan finds several open slots for a watch, they're sorted by closeness to 7:00pm (the tool's current fixed "ideal" dinner time), so the slot nearest prime time is reported first.

A note on terms of service

Automating interaction with OpenTable is contrary to its Terms of Service. This project exists anyway as a personal-use convenience — the same kind of "did the 7pm slot open up yet" checking a person would otherwise do by refreshing a browser tab every few minutes, just handed off to software so you don't have to. It deliberately contains no booking automation — every match ends in a link, not a reservation — and it enforces the rate limits above so it can't be turned into a scraper by accident.

Use it at your own risk, for your own household's dinner plans — a handful of personal watches, not a scraping operation. If OpenTable's terms matter to you, read them before running this.

What Claude can do once it's connected

Tool	What it does
add_watch	Start watching a restaurant for a party size across a set of dates/times
list_watches	List every configured watch and its status
pause_watch / resume_watch	Temporarily stop/resume scanning without deleting the watch
remove_watch	Delete a watch and its match history
check_now	Check availability immediately instead of waiting for the next scan
recent_matches	See previously found matching time slots
status	Whether the background daemon is running, plus a summary of all watches
setup_session	Instructions for (re-)establishing the trusted browser session

Configuration

Watches and state live in ~/.config/opentable-watcher/ by default ($XDG_CONFIG_HOME/opentable-watcher if set). Override the location with --config-dir or the OTWATCHER_CONFIG_DIR environment variable — useful if you want the MCP server and the daemon to share state explicitly, or to run more than one independent watcher.

Troubleshooting

"availability fetch returned non-JSON (likely Akamai challenge)" The saved session has gone stale or was never fully trusted. Re-run:

opentable-watcher seed <restaurant-url>

Browse until times render before pressing Enter — a quick glance often isn't enough for the sensor JS to finish validating.

Nothing works when run headless / on a server Akamai's behavioral checks are much more likely to flag a headless browser. seed always opens a visible window by design, and the daemon needs a real display too. Running on a headless server? See the Xvfb section in docs/daemon-setup.md.

A watch stopped reporting matches / says expired Watches expire once every date in their window is in the past. Check with status or list_watches, and create a new watch with updated dates.

More docs

• docs/mcp-config.md — full MCP client configuration
• docs/daemon-setup.md — running the 24/7 background daemon (systemd, launchd, Xvfb)

License

MIT — see LICENSE.