Los Altos, Calif. – The first restaurant dining guide that allows Web-surfing gourmands to place pick-up or home delivery orders on-line has opened for business in cyber-space. 

[Waiter.Com], whose tag line is "the Web site for your appetite," allows some 100 restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area to fulfill delivery and takeout orders for their customers. From pizza to elaborate multicourse meals, [Waiter.Com] is the first site on the Web that will allow consumers to place a takeout or delivery order. 

Among the Bay Area restaurants that are part of the website are Le Boulanger, Hobee’s, TOGO’s, Round Table Pizza, Chilli’s, Subway, Rock’n Tacos, Golden Wok, Armadillo Willy’s and others. 

The protocols at the site allow guests to specify how they would like their meals prepared and when they should be ready for pickup or delivery. Orders are then sent automatically to the restaurant of choice. 

[Waiter.Com] was created by Craig Cohen and Michael S. Adelberg, president and vice president, respectively, of Maverick Solutions, the company behind the site. Friends since junior high school, Cohen and Adelberg conceived of their project while they were pursuing M.B.A. degrees at Stanford University. 

"We were very interested in creating something on the Web that people would find useful every day," Cohen said. 

"We built [Waiter.Com] to be user friendly with many benefits to the consumer, such as no need to keep a drawer full of outdated menus’ no busy signals or long periods on hold when one orders over the phone’ the ability to order accurately for large groups of people and the ability to have the order billed directly to a credit card," Adelberg explained. 

Future software improvements will allow customers to store previous orders for instant recall. Also on tap is a forthcoming ability to allow catering for large parties. 

The way the system works, the diner reaches [Waiter.Com] at http://www.waiter.com. After he uses the directory to click on to the restaurant of choice, another screen opens that shows the menu with several prompts to clarify the size of the order, the preferred method of preparation and the choice of pickup or delivery. 

All of that information is then faxed to the restaurant from [Waiter.Com]'s headquarters.