Skip to content

Pre-Shift Team Briefing Pack

Example prompt: "Half an hour before each service, pull today's bookings from our reservations sheet — covers count, special occasions, allergies, VIPs — combine it with what the head chef has written up for today's specials and the 86'd list, and post a one-page briefing to our team Slack so the floor and the kitchen are on the same page before doors open."

The Problem

The pre-service briefing is the five-minute talk that decides whether the dairy-allergy on table 7 gets caught before the dessert lands, whether the regular on table 12 is greeted by name, and whether the kitchen and the floor have agreed which two dishes are off tonight. In most independent restaurants the briefing is done by the manager standing in the dining room reading out things from their phone, which works on a quiet Tuesday and falls apart on a busy Friday when the manager is checking the float and chasing the late commis at the same time. The allergies and special occasions are in the bookings sheet, the specials and 86'd list are on a piece of paper by the pass, and the VIP notes are in the manager's head — and the briefing only catches them all if the manager has the ten minutes to assemble the pack.

How GloriaMundo Solves It

We build a workflow that fires thirty minutes before each service and assembles the briefing pack from the three places it lives. An integration step reads today's bookings from the reservations Google Sheet — covers, sitting times, special occasions, allergy notes, and the manager's tagged VIPs. A second integration step reads the head chef's today-note from a shared Google Doc the kitchen updates by midday, picking up the specials, the 86'd items, and any ready-by warnings. An LLM step assembles the pack into a single Slack-ready message, organised by what the team needs to know in order — covers and sitting plan, allergies and special occasions table-by-table, VIPs and regulars, specials with the line-by-line description, what is off tonight. The pack is posted to a single team channel before doors open so floor, pass, and kitchen are reading the same thing. Glass Box preview shows the assembled pack before it lands in Slack so the manager can catch a mis-flagged allergy on the first run and trust it after that.

Example Workflow Steps

  1. Trigger (scheduled): Thirty minutes before each service start — typically 11:30 for lunch and 17:30 for dinner.
  2. Step 1 (integration): Read today's bookings from the 'Reservations' tab in Google Sheets — covers, sitting time, party name, special-occasion note, allergy note, VIP flag.
  3. Step 2 (integration): Read today's kitchen-note from the shared Google Doc the head chef updates by midday — specials with description, 86'd items, ready-by times for slow-cook dishes.
  4. Step 3 (llm): Assemble the briefing pack in a single Slack-ready format — covers and sitting plan up top, allergies and special occasions table-by-table, VIPs and regulars, specials with line descriptions, off-tonight list at the bottom.
  5. Step 4 (integration): Post the briefing in the team Slack channel so floor, pass, and kitchen all see the same thing before doors open.
  6. Step 5 (integration): Append a row to a 'Briefings' tab in the reservations sheet with the date, service, covers count, and a link to the Slack message so the manager can refer back if a question comes up mid-service.

Integrations Used

  • Google Sheets — the reservations register where covers, allergies, special occasions, and VIP flags live, and the 'Briefings' tab for the log
  • Google Docs — the head chef's today-note with specials, 86'd items, and ready-by times
  • Slack — the team channel where the briefing lands so floor, pass, and kitchen read the same pack before service

Who This Is For

Front-of-house managers and head chefs at independent restaurants, bistros, and gastropubs where the bookings sheet is in Google Sheets, the kitchen note lives in a shared Google Doc, and the team coordinates on Slack — anyone who currently does the briefing standing in the dining room reading off their phone and would prefer a one-page pack in the team channel that the new starter on a Friday can read before the doors open.

Time & Cost Saved

The assembly itself is a ten-minute job done well or a two-minute job done badly. The cost of a missed allergy on a busy Friday is much higher than ten minutes of any manager's time — both the immediate cost of getting it wrong with a diner and the slower cost on the next review. The workflow does not replace the briefing — the manager still stands in front of the team and walks through it — but it removes the assembly step from a moment where there is rarely ten quiet minutes, and it puts the same pack in front of the kitchen and the floor so the briefing is read from one document rather than three.