Restaurants & Food Service
An independent restaurant, bistro, or gastropub runs on a steady stream of small jobs between service and the kitchen pass — a four-star review on Google that wants a reply before the next prospective diner scrolls past, the prep list for tomorrow that needs to come off the bookings sheet by 6pm so the cold larder can start, the supplier order for fish that has to be in by 3pm or it does not arrive on the morning van, the table of ten on Saturday night whose confirmation has gone quiet two days out. These workflows take the repeating bits off the manager's desk and the head chef's evening so the human time goes into the cases where a person's judgement matters — talking the disappointed diner through what went wrong, deciding whether to push the Saturday lunch sitting back fifteen minutes, working out whether the new starter on Friday is ready to plate the mains.
Nothing in this category posts a public review reply, sends a confirmation request to a diner, or places a supplier order without review. Every review draft, prep list, supplier email, and booking-chase message stops at a Gmail draft or a Slack post in an internal channel for the owner, head chef, or front-of-house manager to read and send. The cost of a defensive reply to a critical review, a fish order with the wrong portion count, or a confirmation chase that names the wrong table is much higher than the cost of one minute reviewing the queue. Slack and the bookings sheet are used for coordination — diners' names appear in those messages because the team needs to act on them, and the sheet is the system of record until a restaurant-specific integration is available.
Use Cases
| Use Case | Description |
|---|---|
| Customer Review Reply Drafter | When a review notification lands in the restaurant inbox from Google, TripAdvisor, or OpenTable, pull the rating and the text, draft a sincere reply tuned to the tier, and put it in front of the owner for sign-off — never auto-posted |
| Daily Supplier Order Builder | Each afternoon, pull current stock and the next two days' expected covers, work out what fresh produce, dairy, meat, and dry goods we need, group by preferred supplier, and draft a per-supplier order email for the head chef or manager to send |
| Large Booking Confirmation Chase | For any booking of six or more covers without a confirmed reply, draft a friendly confirmation request, walk a 7/3/1-day chase ladder against the booking date, and escalate to the front-of-house manager on Slack the day before if the table is still unconfirmed |
| Next-Day Kitchen Prep List from Bookings | Every evening, read tomorrow's bookings from the reservations sheet, combine with our standard menu-mix ratios to estimate the dish counts, cross-check against current stock, and draft the prep list per kitchen station for the head chef to sign off before service |