What an AI receptionist for restaurants answers, and what it costs.

Restaurant enquiries arrive at the worst possible moment, and there is a reason for it. Somebody choosing where to eat on Friday looks you up on Friday, while your host stand is turning covers and the pass is buried. Whoever could answer has a wine list in one hand and a card machine in the other.

Most of these are not conversations. They are quick questions, and the same short list comes round. What time you stop serving, whether you take walk-ins, what the menu has for a vegan or a coeliac, where to park, private hire. Every one of them already has an answer on a page somebody at your restaurant wrote.

What is missing is a person free to repeat it while service runs. So two things happen. The diner tries the place two doors down, and your chef comes off the pass to settle a dietary question your published menu already covers. Neither one shows up in a report: the diner who left never rang and never wrote, so nothing was logged.

Search restaurant answering service and three unrelated products come back, which is why their quotes are so hard to compare. Only one of them reaches the diner who is already reading your menu.

A phone comparison usually skips this part. These five are quick questions, not conversations: the answer is already in writing, and somebody in your restaurant repeats it one enquiry at a time. A website chatbot reads them off the pages you approved and gives them back the moment they are asked.

• "What time do you stop serving?" Your hours page, worded as you wrote it: the last booking of the night, whether the kitchen shuts before the bar does, and the bank-holiday variations you published.
• "Do you take walk-ins?" Your reservations page, in your own wording — whether you hold tables back, whether the bar seats people who have yet to book, whether a wet Tuesday differs from a Saturday.
• "Is there anything for a vegan or a coeliac?" The dietary tags your menu already carries, with a link to the page they came from. An allergy question is a different question with a different answer, and it goes to your kitchen.
• "Where do we park?" Asked constantly, and faster to read on a page than to be told over the phone. Parking, step-free access, the nearest station, whether the private room upstairs has lift access.
• "Can you do private hire?" What your private-dining page says you offer, plus the details your events lead needs. Prices and the room stay with them; the assistant only passes on the brief.

One thing stays off that list: tonight's specials, which live on the kitchen printout instead of a page. Your phone keeps ringing through all of this, too — it just rings about fewer of these five.

"Anything Saturday?" is the message every restaurant knows and nobody can act on. It leaves out everything your host would ask for first, so somebody types back, waits, types again, and the diner has decided by the second reply. Lead capture asks for it all up front, in the diner's own words.

• Covers. How many people — the number that decides whether the enquiry is even possible on the night they want.
• Date and sitting. Which night, and how late they can eat; an early sitting and a last booking are different jobs for your floor.
• The occasion. A birthday, an anniversary, a wake. Your team handles each differently, and knowing beforehand is most of the work.
• Dietary notes. Recorded as the diner typed them, flagged for the kitchen, and carried through to whoever picks the enquiry up.
• Where to carry on. An email alert lands with whoever you named for reservations, and the diner can pick the thread back up over WhatsApp.

The assistant cannot read your diary or your table plan, so how Saturday is filling stays a question for the host stand. It captures the enquiry and passes it to whoever holds the book — your inbox, a WhatsApp number, the sheet by the door — and a person confirms the table. A chat window that told a diner Saturday was free would be guessing, and that is the one thing your floor cannot afford.

A person confirms the table, every time. The assistant's job is to make sure that person starts with the covers, the night and any dietary note already in hand.

One question matters more than the rest, and all three purchases run into it: is this dish safe for an allergy? A person reading a script, software speaking on the line and a chat window are all in the same position. None of them is in your kitchen.

That holds however the question is put. A diner who rephrases, insists, or calls the allergy a mild one gets the same handover, because the limit is set by where the answers come from. The assistant answers only from your approved pages, and tonight's plate has never been on one.

Two smaller boundaries belong here. Where you have written down a licensing or age rule, the assistant repeats it; otherwise the question reaches a named person. A complaint about last night is not answered in chat: it goes to your manager with the diner's words intact. And buying any of this changes nothing about your compliance — allergen procedure, licensing and record-keeping stay yours.

A human answering service bills you for what it handles: a per-call rate, or a monthly allowance with a charge for anything above it. So the invoice rises exactly when you are busiest, which is the one thing a restaurant controls least. Ask any supplier for three figures together: the rate, the monthly minimum, and what a call costs after you close.

Software is priced the other way round: one flat monthly figure, however busy the week. The Free plan is £0 and includes 50 message credits; paid plans buy 200, 500 and 4,000 credits for £8, £20 and £75 a month. One credit is spent per answer, and the pricing page sets the plans beside each other.

1. Read last Friday back. Open the inbox, the booking form and the messages, and mark every enquiry that waited past the point the diner had decided. You already have that record.
2. Sort them by channel. Phone calls in one pile, typed messages in the other. The typed pile is the one the assistant answers.
3. Price the two piles separately. Apply the per-call rate to the spoken pile. Price the typed pile against a flat monthly figure that does not move when a Saturday goes well.

Plenty of restaurants end up paying for both. Someone on the line catches the diner who rings, and the chat window catches the one who read your menu and left without a word.

Getting one live is roughly a ten-minute job: point it at the pages a diner reads — the à la carte, the wine list, your hours, the private-dining page, the set and children's menus. Go through what it proposes to say, then add one line to your website. That middle step is the real work: you are deciding in advance what your restaurant says to a stranger.

Throw your worst questions at it first: the nut question, a party too big for any table you own, the dog at the bar, the group wanting the room to themselves. Change any answer you would rather it did not give. Adoomi for restaurants starts with those boundaries already set, and you have the final say.

On data, since it always comes up: diner conversations are stored inside the EU, and a GDPR request can export or erase them. Logs record identifiers instead of the message text, and the chat window uses no tracking cookies.