opentable-mcp

MCP server for OpenTable restaurant search and availability, reverse-engineered from observed web traffic.

Built entirely by Claude Opus 4.8 via Claude Code.

Overview

Exposes anonymous, read-only OpenTable restaurant discovery and availability through MCP tools. It can find restaurants and check tables — it cannot book.

• opentable_autocomplete — resolve a place, cuisine, or restaurant name to search anchors (restaurantId, lat/long, metroId, areaId)

• opentable_list_regions — metro and sub-region geography with ids and restaurant counts

• opentable_nearby_restaurants — restaurants near a lat/long with name, restaurantId, cuisine, price band, rating, phone, and profile URL

• opentable_restaurant_availability — bookable time slots for one or more restaurants on a single date, time, and party size

• opentable_multi_day_availability — a single restaurant's availability scanned forward across many days

• opentable_session_status — inspect or force-refresh the session and Akamai cookie state

Typical workflow: opentable_autocomplete resolves a name to a restaurantId, then opentable_restaurant_availability or opentable_multi_day_availability checks tables. Availability slots are raw data — each dateTime is ISO-8601 local to the restaurant (no timezone), plus the raw timeOffsetMinutes.

Setup

npm install
npm run build
npm run verify

No configuration is required — the server mints its own session on first use. Copy .env.example to .env for optional overrides (default search center, captured-cookie fallback, browser settings).

Requires Node.js 20+ and Google Chrome installed (used via playwright-core to mint an Akamai-valid session; no separate browser download). No OpenTable account needed.

MCP Setup

The server runs over stdio. Example client configuration:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "opentable": {
      "command": "node",
      "args": ["/absolute/path/to/opentable-mcp/dist/index.js"],
      "cwd": "/absolute/path/to/opentable-mcp"
    }
  }
}

For local development, use npx tsx src/index.ts instead of the built output. A manifest.json is included for bundle-aware clients.

Notes

• Anonymous and read-only — no account, no booking. The booking flow is intentionally out of scope.

• OpenTable is behind Akamai Bot Manager, whose _abck cookie is only validated by a real browser. The server mints a session lazily with a headful (offscreen) Chrome via your installed Chrome, persists it to ~/.config/opentable-mcp/session.json, and re-mints only when a request is blocked — no scheduler. A captured OPENTABLE_COOKIE is used as a fallback when present.

• Minting launches Chrome with --disable-blink-features=AutomationControlled (required for the availability endpoint to trust the session), which shows a cosmetic "unsupported command-line flag" banner.

• Heavy back-to-back use can trip Akamai IP rate-limiting; it recovers after a short cooldown.

• Tool errors carry a machine-readable code (AKAMAI_BLOCKED, PERSISTED_QUERY_NOT_FOUND, CSRF_REJECTED, SESSION_UNAVAILABLE). See docs/api-spec.md for the reverse-engineering notes.