A fairer platform for the people who feed us

Why I built TableFlow

I grew up in restaurants. My father, Arlindo Veríssimo Codinha, trained at the Marinha Mercante — Portugal's merchant navy — in Lisbon, then gave his life to hospitality at sea, running the dining room aboard a ferry off the coast of Norway. In 1989 my parents opened a place of their own in Nazaré, on Portugal's Atlantic coast, and named it O Navegante — "The Navigator." I left everything to help them run it. I bussed the tables, worked the floor, later even ran a ferry café in England. I know, in my own hands, what a restaurant costs the people who pour their lives into it.

I also became a designer who codes — and, strangely, I began where my father did: in Lisbon, on an IBM mainframe, in the early '80s. For forty years those two worlds — the screen and the dining room — ran side by side and never quite met. Then, when the company I’d given years to was sold, my chapter there closed. I didn’t feel the fall — I felt free — and for the first time, the two worlds became one.

I built TableFlow alone, here in Toronto: a platform that never taxes the relationship between a restaurant and its guests. No per-cover fees. Restaurants keep 100%. Your guests are yours. Because I watched my family earn every single one — and no one should ever have to rent them back.

— Arlindo Oliveira Codinha · Founder · Toronto

For my mother and father — and for every restaurant owner, the world over.