Area foodies have been using OpenTable since 1998 to book tables at some of the area’s best restaurants. The service allows diners to search for restaurants and reserve tables with a few simple mouse clicks, and also rewards members with points, redeemable for coupons at participating establishments. The service did have a few bugs, and lacked a few features that could have made searching all the easier.

Yesterday afternoon, OpenTable relaunched, debuting features designed to add to your experience on the site. They now allow you to restrict searches by geographic area, allowing you to search only among the 100 participating restaurants in D.C. or 28 in Northern Virginia. You can also search for specific restaurants from a handy drop down menu, and create a customized favorites list. The latter comes in particularly handy for frequent users of the service, who in the past had to go through a series of pages to find a table at popular restaurants like Firefly or Vidalia.

Taking clients out on K Street, but can’t get a table at Corduroy? OpenTable now features a “restaurants nearby” feature that can direct you to nearby Ceiba and Georgia Brown’s. There are also user-submitted lists of suggested restaurants if you can’t get into your favorite spot and an “affiliated restaurants” feature to find tables within a specific group.

In other OpenTable news, the site recently launched their service in the United Kingdom. Planning a quick get-away to London and dining at Le Gavroche? Sometime soon, you might be able to book your reservations from your office desktop an ocean away.