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Don't start browsing restaurant website Toptable if you have a pressing deadline or are on a diet. The site is enough to distract anyone, and heaven for foodies planning gastronomic adventures.

The Toptable team has striven to make the site inspiring and fun, and customers risk coming to depend upon it rather than just phoning a restaurant themselves.

This month the news section lists restaurants offering Stinking Bishop cheese, made famous by the film Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were Rabbit. It also carried recommendations on places to eat after firework displays or to celebrate Diwali, and suggests restaurants for Christmas parties or a stag nights. There are even recommendations for those seeking simple 'comfort food'.

In the circumstances, it is a little disappointing to find that Toptable cannot help its users get a table at The Ivy, London's top celebrity eatery. But as founder Karen Hanton observes: 'Some restaurants need our help more than others.' Certainly, there is a sufficiently comprehensive selection of restaurants to give even the fussiest diner food for thought.

Hanton, an energetic Scot who has become a serial entrepreneur, came up with the idea for Toptable in 1999.

Having acquired a building in London's Parsons Green in a property venture, she opened a restaurant on the ground floor and swiftly discovered how few ways there are to promote a restaurant.

She decided the internet must offer a solution and developed the Toptable business model. The site offers restaurants a listing for £1600, plus £2 commission on every customer who books online. It includes 360-degree pictures of venues and ratings by previous diners, and customers are encouraged to book via the site by the offer of discounts and reward points.

Toptable was launched in the giddy summer of 2000, when dotcom businesses seemed poised to inherit the earth. Hanton scored some enviable PR through her business partner and friend, the Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson, and brought in celebrity chef Gary Rhodes as an investor.

But she soon discovered the downside to the timing of the launch and the site's celebrity links. When the dotcom economy bombed later that year, reporters were quick to ask Ferguson how much money he had lost.

Toptable only entered profit in the past two years and Hanton admits it was tough to survive. These days, she is proud to run one of the few dotcom businesses to have seen out the crash.

Hanton believes her insistence on slow, steady growth, rather than the accelerating madness the dotcom boom produced among many of her peers, has proved key. 'I was older than your average dotcom entrepreneur,' she says.

The business was run from Hanton's central London home for its first six months, then moved into the mews house next door. Hanton has fond memories of meeting Diageo executives to discuss their investment, with her pet rabbit peering at them from the stairs.

Now housed in a more traditional office, Toptable employs 40 staff. But it is having to deal with what Hanton describes as one of the toughest years the London restaurant business has seen. Naturally, this has hit revenue, but Hanton says it has made the site more attractive to restaurants looking to fill empty seats. It has also made Toptable a must for consumers who want to eat out but don't want to break the bank.

Hanton is keen to embrace other consumer channels and launched an i-mode mobile operation last month, allowing customers to text requests for restaurant information and make bookings from their phones.

Having survived for six years, she has the confidence to see beyond the current difficulties in central London. The site already lists restaurants in Paris and Barcelona and is signing eateries in New York. Next on Hanton's list are Amsterdam and Berlin. Foodies will soon be able to indulge as easily while travelling the world.

TIMELINE

Feb 2000: Toptable launches, listing 500 restaurants.

Aug 2002: Diageo invests in the company.

Jan 2005: Launches overseas booking service, with selection of Paris restaurants.

Feb 2005: Conran Group sales and marketing director Chris Wood is recruited as managing director.

June 2005: Adds Barcelona to restaurant listings.

Oct 2005: Turnover hits £2.5m as Toptable records £50m worth of restaurant bookings in a year.

Jan 2006: Plans to add New York to listings.