AI employees for restaurants & cafés
You closed at midnight, and the review that came in during service still needs an answer, the weekend special still needs a post, and Tuesday is still dead. An AI team handles the laptop work; you run the room.
Restaurants live or die on repeat visits, and repeat visits come from the unglamorous stuff: posting the specials, answering every review like a human, promoting the quiz night, and filling the slow Tuesday. KentoHQ gives you named AI employees who own those jobs on a schedule, draft everything in your voice for your approval, and prove each one was actually done — for a flat subscription that costs less than one comped table.
The problems this actually solves
- The specials change weekly; the Instagram doesn't — text over the new menu or a photo of the dish, and get the week's posts drafted — captions that sound like your place, not a stock food blog — scheduled and verified published.
- Review replies are either instant-canned or three weeks late — every new Google review gets a drafted reply that mentions what they actually ordered and how the night went — including the two-star ones, answered calmly and specifically. You approve, it posts.
- Tuesday and Wednesday nights run half empty — slow-night promos drafted end to end — the offer copy, the email to your list, the posts — timed to land Monday, so the quiet nights get worked instead of written off.
- Events get planned but never promoted — one brief (“wine dinner, the 24th, five courses”) becomes the announcement post, the reminder posts, the email, and a page on your site — a promotion calendar, not a single forgotten story.
- The place down the street changed their menu and you found out from a regular — Victor checks the neighbouring restaurants' sites and menus weekly and tells you only what changed — new brunch, price moves, a new event series.
What your AI team does in a typical week
Specials posts, seasonal dishes, behind-the-pass moments — drafted from your photos and a one-line brief, in your tone, published on schedule and verified live.
Drafted replies to each new review — warm and specific to what they wrote, firm but fair on the unreasonable ones. Queued each morning for your one-tap approval.
Writes the Tuesday-night offer, the event announcement, and the email to your list — copy that gives people a reason to come in midweek, ready before the week starts.
Weekly diff of nearby restaurants' menus, prices, and events. Silence means nothing changed; a note means something did.
One short note before you open: reviews waiting for approval, posts going out, this week's promo status. Two minutes over coffee, then back to the pass.
What it costs vs what it replaces
A restaurant typically cobbles together a social scheduler, a review tool it stopped opening in March, and a nephew who “does the Instagram” — and the slow nights still go unpromoted. KentoHQ is one flat subscription (free in early access, no per-seat, no credit meter) that does those jobs and shows the receipt. If it fills four extra covers on a Tuesday, it's paid for the month.
Frequently asked
I run a kitchen, not a laptop. Is this for me?
Yes — that's the point. You brief agents the way you'd brief front-of-house: plain language, once. Send a photo of the special and a line about it; the rest gets drafted. Nothing to install, no workflows to build.
Will the review replies sound like a robot?
No — each reply is drafted from what the guest actually wrote, in a voice the team learns from replies you've approved. The canned “thank you for your feedback!” is exactly what this exists to kill. And nothing posts without your approval.
Can it handle the nasty one-star review?
It drafts the calm, specific reply you'd write on your best day — acknowledges what went wrong, states your side without arguing, invites them back if you want to. You always read it before it goes out.
Does it take reservations or answer the phone?
No — no AI phone answering, and it doesn't plug into your booking system. It owns everything around the booking: the posts, the promos, the event pages, the review replies that make people book in the first place.
What does “verified” mean?
An independent engine checks every task before it counts as done — the post actually published, the reply draft actually exists. No “done!” that wasn't.
See the whole team, how verification works, or all industries.