The market for initial public offerings has been all but boarded up by the financial crisis. The unemployment rate in the restaurant business is nearing 10 percent, after what Cowen & Co. restaurant analyst Paul Westra describes as "one of the most brutal years in history for the restaurant industry." And fine dining sales are forecast to fall 12 percent to 15 percent in 2009.

But restaurant reservation service OpenTable is filing to go public anyway.

The San Francisco company, headed by former eBay and PayPal executive Jeff Jordan, filed for a $40 million initial public offering Friday, daring to dowhat few others have done in recent months. Open Table is only the third venture nationwide to register for an IPO this year. If it does manage to go public — and filing for an offering is no guarantee— it will be among the few companies that have managed to do so in quite a while. According to The National Venture Capital Association, there were just six IPO exits in 2008, the fewest annual venture-backed offerings since 1977.