Bringing Tablets To Restaurant Tables Nationwide Nets E la Carte $35 Million
On the heels of a nationwide rollout with Applebee's, E la Carte has raised $35 million to bring its tablet technology to more restaurant tables around the country and around the world.
Context & Ripple Effects
The raise is the payoff to a bet placed in December 2013, when E la Carte signed the [[a:1200939|Applebee's deal to put 100,000 tableside tablets across every U.S. location by year-end 2014]]. With that rollout now complete, the $35 million converts a proof-of-concept into an expansion war chest for tables beyond Applebee's and beyond the United States.
It also lands on a tabletop already being contested: OpenTable began testing mobile payments at restaurants in mid-2013, so the question of who mediates the diner's order-and-pay moment has been open for over a year. That both the Wall Street Journal and TechCrunch carried the funding story the same day signals how far the hardware-at-the-table thesis has traveled past trade press.
First-order effects
- E la Carte gains capital to scale beyond a single flagship chain and into international markets, while Applebee's becomes the reference deployment it sells against.
- Applebee's servers shift from order-takers to service staff as ordering and payment move onto the 100,000 deployed tablets.
Second-order effects
- Other casual-dining chains face a competitive benchmark: if Applebee's table experience measurably lifts check sizes or turn times, laggards must either buy a similar system or explain why they didn't.
- OpenTable's mobile payments tests now compete directly for the same pay-at-the-table moment, pushing reservation and POS players toward device strategies of their own.
Third-order effects
- If the Applebee's economics hold, restaurant technology splits into two camps — capital-heavy hardware deployers like E la Carte and software-only layers like OpenTable — forcing investors to choose which owns the diner relationship.
- Widespread tableside devices normalize guest-facing screens in casual dining, making data on what diners order, browse, and tip a new asset class for the chains that host them.
The trend: Casual-dining restaurants are shifting ordering and payment from waitstaff to tableside devices, with hardware-backed startups raising growth capital to claim the tabletop before software incumbents do.