Ancient history, I suppose. But perhaps worth thinking about in light of OpenTable’s rather astonishing IPO last week. Originally priced at between $12 and $14, shares in the company were instead listed at $20. They opened at $24.50 and then spiked to $33 before closing at $31.81. A 59 percent surge on the first day of trading. For a company whose business is built on the recession-brutalized fine-dining industry? Impressive. Must have made for quite a windfall for OpenTable’s’s larger investors. Especially those who took the opportunity to dump their stakes in the company. Charles Schwab (SCHW), Pacific Asset Partners, W Capital Partners, Venture Frogs, Zagat and a number of small private investors sold off all their OpenTable shares as part of the company’s IPO (click on chart below), according to the SEC filing.

Interesting, yeah? Seems at least some of the company’s investors had been hoping for an exit. And they fled for it in unison, pockets full, when one was offered. Perhaps they’d lost their appetite for risk after reading through the Risk Factors section of Open Tables IPO filing, which grimly noted that “a significant majority of our restaurant customers are fine-dining restaurants which have been particularly affected by economic downturns such as the one we are currently experiencing.”

Or perhaps, like Scott Sweet, a senior managing partner at I.P.O. Boutique, they remember Foodline and the last dot-com bubble and bust. “People don’t truly know the story here about this company. It’s a one-trick pony company,” Sweet told the New York Times. “Pricier restaurants in San Francisco, Tampa, New York are not that hard to get in right now. In fact, one can do it themselves if they choose, with 15 minutes notice.”

Astonishing for a restaurant reservation company going public in the middle of the worst recession in decades. And especially for OpenTable, which has posted operating losses in four of the last five years and saw the total number of reservations seated by its restaurant customers drop 10 to 15 percent for the fourth quarter of 2008 from the same period in 2007. Sure, revenue increased 36 percent in 2008 and 21 percent in the first quarter of 2009 compared to prior years. But come on–booking reservations in empty restaurants? At a time when the public is chowing down on Top Ramen?

“This [is] reminiscent of the 1999-2000 IPO pricings,” IPO Boutique partner Scott Sweet said in a research note to clients. “This IPO environment has not and should not see a pricing like what was chosen, considering the restaurant business is very prone to the recession. I believe that once sanity prevails, it will likely trade down hard.”