A fancy restaurant owner just solved his industry’s biggest problem

Nakamura Hitoshi at Rising Expo Tokyo 2015.

The experience of dining out is every bit as rooted in hospitality as a hotel stay. Over the course of a meal that might last less than an hour, diners are presented with dozens of opportunities to judge the quality of wait service, the decor, or the room’s temperature before they even settle on appetizers. But no matter how good a restaurant’s atmosphere or food are, there remains a constant threat of losing customers at the doorway to botched reservations.

Nakamura Hitoshi endured countless such business casualties during his early years as a restaurateur in Tokyo’s luxury dining scene. After almost a decade at Panasonic and Ogilvy & Mather, Nakamura founded Grace Inc., a restaurant group that has grown to include three restaurants and two bars. He recalls that during the early days, many customers he greeted at the door left only moments later, after finding out that there had been a mix-up with their reservations.

“It was terrible, watching business walk out the front door,” says Nakamura, cringing. “It was a constant frustration for us.”

Nakamura’s Butagumi restaurants, located in some of Tokyo’s most vibrant business districts and specializing in various pork dishes, continued to grow in popularity. Each now boasts a rating of at least 3.5 of 5 on Tabelog, which constitutes high praise on the Japanese user review site. All the same, Nakamura shuddered to think of the money his company was losing in the reservation stage. In 2013, he founded Toreta, a company that sought to solve his restaurants’ reservation scheduling problems. Two years later, Toreta’s ambitions have reached thousands of other restaurants around Japan.

Simplifying reservations

The service that Nakamura built marks a quantum leap in Japan’s reservation management. Toreta is available as an iPad app that takes restaurant employees through a customer call from start to finish. In a performance that garnered Toreta the top prize at last month’s Rising Expo in Tokyo, Nakamura demonstrated how to input information, adjust schedules, and make customer notes in real time.

The kicker, he pointed out, is that Toreta plumbs a database of customer information that can help employees provide a personal touch for returning patrons. Anniversary or birthday dinners and regular rendezvous are recognized so that repeated requests such as champagne service or VIP rooms can be predicted. The app even has a small box for restaurant staff to quickly sketch custom designs for cake decorations. Details are relayed to customers via text message reminder, eliminating the need to make confirmation calls.

Like the American service OpenTable, Toreta allows for web reservations as well, but Nakamura notes that the telephone will likely remain Japan’s preferred method of contact. Many of Toreta’s features are designed to prevent confusion and maximize efficiency while on the phone. There’s an option to record calls for reference, and customer names are displayed in Japanese phonetic kana instead of more easily mistaken Chinese characters.

All of this points to Toreta’s obsession with user experience design, which Nakamura calls the driving force behind the app’s success. App literacy can never be taken for granted in Japan’s aging society, which is why the Toreta team focused on user interface. Buttons are large and clearly marked, and user input is minimized; every field that requires typing is a potential speedbump during a customer call.

“The services that don’t take off are the ones that require too much of the user,” says Nakamura. “We want to be in as many restaurants as possible, which means focusing on usability as much as functionality.”

Room for growth

Repping Japan