The restaurant that answers while the kitchen is slammed

Friday night, a quarter to eight. Every table is full at Rúnar's little restaurant on Laugavegur, and the kitchen is going flat out. That is when the phone starts ringing. “Do you have gluten-free?” “Is there a table for six at nine?” “Do you have a highchair?” “Are you open on Sunday?” While he tries to grab the phone between running plates, messages are also piling up in the chat on the website. Rúnar knows the answer to every one of them. He just has no free hands to give them, right when they are coming in.

Most restaurateurs know this. The inquiries come thickest exactly when you can least field them, in the middle of service, when every pair of hands is tied up on the floor or back in the kitchen.

And most of them are always the same. Opening hours, the menu, allergens, a free table, whether there is room for a pram. These questions can be answered automatically on the website, at any hour, so that only what genuinely needs a person lands on the staff mid-shift.

The inquiry arrives when no one can answer

The kitchen load is only half the story. The other half is timing. Friday and Saturday nights are both the busiest stretch and the time when most table bookings are made. An unanswered call then costs more than the nuisance, it is a table that books somewhere else. A hungry guest who gets no answer calls the next place on the list, and does it in under a minute.

Then there is the other end of the day. People plan their evening late. Someone is on the sofa at eleven, looking the place up, wanting to know whether you are open on Tuesday and whether they can get a vegan dish. If the answer does not come then, the booking may never come at all.

How restaurants try to solve it

The most common approach is simply to let the phone ring and hope people call back or send an email. Some do. Many do not, they just move on to the next place.

The next step is to put everything on the website, the menu, the hours, the allergen information, and hope the guest reads it. That helps, but a static page cannot answer “is there a table for nine tonight,” and it cannot answer “is the langoustine soup gluten-free tonight” when the ingredients change from day to day. People ask even when the answer is written somewhere, because they want to be sure.

A third route is to have a staff member answer between tables. It works, but under pressure mistakes happen, and attention drifts from the guests who are already there, waiting at their table.

An online booking system takes table reservations, which is good, but it answers no questions. The guest who is unsure about an allergy will not book blind, they want an answer first.

The newest option is an AI that answers from the restaurant's own knowledge. It takes the repetition as it comes, in Icelandic and English, whether it is seven on a Friday night or eleven on a Sunday. It takes the reservation in the conversation and hands the team whatever needs a person. But it is only as good as what it is taught, and when it comes to allergens it has to know when to point to the staff rather than guess.

Allergens do not tolerate a guess

Most restaurant questions can survive an uncertain answer. One cannot. When a guest asks whether a dish is free of nuts or gluten, a wrong answer is worse than none, it can end in the emergency room. So an answer about allergens should come from what the restaurant has itself recorded, and when something is undocumented or uncertain, the honest move is to say so and point to the kitchen, not to fill the gap. A well set up automatic answer says “I am not sure, let me have the chef confirm that for you” rather than sounding confident and being wrong.

Frequently asked questions

Can Anna answer about allergens and ingredients? She answers from what you have taught her, the menu, ingredient lists, and documents you upload. What is recorded, she answers directly. What is uncertain, she does not answer on a hunch, she says she needs it confirmed and hands the matter to the staff. For allergens that is the only right way.

Does she take table bookings? She takes the reservation in the chat, name, time, and party size, and passes it cleanly to the team, with confirmation by email. How far she carries the booking itself depends on the system you use. On our Enterprise plan we set up a custom connection into the booking system you already run, and we keep adding more connections over time. If there is a particular system you need, we are glad to hear it.

What about the tourist who asks in English? Anna reads each guest's language and answers in it. Icelandic and English come with every plan, and she does her best in more languages when needed. The tourist who asks about opening hours in English gets an answer in English, right away.

Can someone on the team take over the conversation? Yes. If someone is free, they can step into the chat in real time and answer the guest themselves, then hand the conversation back to Anna afterward. If no one picks it up, it becomes a handoff with a summary, so nothing is lost.

This is why Anna answers the way she does

Anna is built to take on the repetition that comes thickest when the place is full, so it does not land on people who are busy with the guests inside. She answers on the website right away, in Icelandic and English, draws her answers from the restaurant's knowledge, takes reservation requests, and alerts the team when a question calls for judgment or accountability. What she is not sure of she does not guess at, she passes it on.

That way the server keeps their attention on their tables, the chef on the plates, and the guest who sent a question at eleven still gets an answer.

The kitchen will keep being slammed on weekends. That does not mean the inquiries have to sit unanswered while it is.

See what Anna does or chat with her right now, no signup needed. And related: why a wrong answer is worse than none, how she books the appointment there and then in the chat, and how she answers every visitor in their own language.

← All articles