Reservations

OpenTable is the best-known reservation and table-management platform, and its biggest draw is its enormous diner network — hungry people browsing the app can discover and book your restaurant, filling seats you’d otherwise leave empty. It handles online bookings, table management, waitlists and AI-driven guest profiles so you remember regulars and their preferences.

For a restaurant, it takes bookings off the phone and puts your tables in front of new diners. Crucially, you only pay the cover fee for diners the network sends you — walk-ins and direct phone bookings are free. The per-cover fees do add up, so flat-fee alternatives like Resy, Tock or (in the UK) simpleERB are worth comparing; cafés that don’t take bookings can skip this entirely.

AI phone host

During a busy service, the phone is the enemy — it pulls your host away from the guests at the door, and calls that go unanswered are bookings lost to the restaurant down the road. Slang.ai is a voice AI built specifically for restaurants that answers your phone 24/7 in a natural, on-brand voice, handling reservations, opening hours, directions, parking and the endless “do you do gluten-free?” questions.

For a full-service restaurant taking lots of calls, it protects both your bookings and your front-of-house hospitality. It’s a premium, restaurant-specific tool with deep reservation-system integrations; smaller or budget-conscious places can get similar phone-answering from cheaper general tools like Rosie or Goodcall.

Website chatbot

Plenty of guests find you online first, and Tidio adds a chat widget to your website where its Lyro AI instantly answers the common questions — are you open tonight, do you take bookings, is there a kids’ menu, do you cater — using your own information, and captures the enquiry if it needs a human. It works while you’re deep in service or closed for the night.

For a food business, it means website visitors get an instant answer instead of bouncing to a competitor, and enquiries about functions, catering or large bookings are captured rather than lost. Anything the AI can’t handle is passed straight to your team.

POS & online ordering

Toast is a point-of-sale system built from the ground up for restaurants — not adapted retail software — tying together in-house ordering, card payments, kitchen display screens, online ordering and guest marketing in one ecosystem, with AI features layered across it. Because it’s restaurant-only, every feature is designed around how a kitchen and floor actually work.

For a food business, it’s the operational backbone that gets orders to the kitchen accurately and takes payment smoothly, while its online ordering captures delivery and collection sales directly. It’s strongest in the US and priced with hardware and card-processing on top, so UK operators should also weigh up Square for Restaurants or Lightspeed.

Staff scheduling

The staff rota is one of the most painful weekly jobs in hospitality, and 7shifts is built specifically to fix it. Create schedules in minutes, let staff swap and pick up shifts from their phones, handle time-off requests and messaging in one place — and, on paid plans, pull your sales data from the POS so its AI helps you schedule to demand and keep labour costs in check.

For a restaurant or café, that means less time wrestling with a spreadsheet, fewer no-shows and mix-ups, and tighter control over labour — usually your biggest controllable cost after food. The free plan is genuinely usable for a small single-site team.

Inventory & food cost

Food cost is where margin quietly disappears, and MarketMan is an AI-powered inventory platform that brings it under control. Scan supplier invoices and it tracks stock, costs every recipe to the ingredient, monitors price rises and waste, and shows you your real cost of goods and which menu items actually make money — replacing spreadsheets and guesswork with real numbers.

For an established restaurant serious about margins, this is the difference between hoping you’re profitable and knowing it dish by dish. It’s a back-office investment aimed at busier operations; a small café might start with simpler purchasing tools or its POS’s built-in stock features and step up later.

Menus & copy

ChatGPT is the fastest way to handle all the words your food business needs. It writes mouth-watering menu descriptions, social captions and event announcements, drafts replies to reviews (both the glowing and the grumpy), turns your specials into promotional copy, and handles supplier emails and staff notices. It’ll even help you name a new dish or plan a seasonal menu.

For a busy operator, it turns writing jobs you never get round to into a two-minute task on your phone. Give it your dishes and ingredients and it makes them sound irresistible — just tweak the tone so it still sounds like your place.

Ideas & research

Gemini is a strong, free second assistant, handy for the research and brainstorming side of running a food business. Use it to research menu trends and seasonal ingredients, brainstorm promotions for a quiet Tuesday, get talking points for a local event or collaboration, or quickly draft a batch of social post ideas for the month ahead.

Because it plugs into Google’s ecosystem, it’s convenient for quick, current research between prep and service. Running it alongside ChatGPT gives you two capable AI assistants for free — many operators keep both to hand.

Menus & graphics

Canva is how a food business produces professional visuals without a designer: printed and digital menus, specials boards, table talkers, social graphics, loyalty cards and flyers, all from reusable branded templates. Its AI writes text, removes and edits photo backgrounds, and resizes one design for every platform in seconds.

For a restaurant or café, it means your menus and marketing look consistent and polished across the table, the window and social media — turned around in minutes whenever the specials change, with no design skills or agency bill required.

Food photography

Great food photos sell dishes, and Photoroom uses AI to make your phone snaps look professional in seconds. Remove or replace distracting backgrounds, clean up and brighten a plate, and create crisp, consistent images for your menu, delivery-app listings and social feeds — no lightbox or photographer needed.

For a food business, appetising photos directly drive orders on apps like Deliveroo, Uber Eats and Just Eat, where the picture is the product. Photoroom turns a quick phone photo of today’s special into something that actually makes people hungry.

Video & reels

Food is the perfect content for video, and CapCut makes it easy. Turn clips of a dish being plated, the coffee being poured or the kitchen in full flow into slick reels for Instagram, TikTok and Facebook, with AI that trims footage, adds captions and subtitles, syncs to trending audio and can even generate a voiceover.

For a restaurant or café, short food videos are some of the highest-performing content there is — the kind that gets shared and brings people through the door. CapCut lets you make them on your phone in minutes instead of hiring a videographer.

Social scheduling

A food business lives or dies on social media, and Later lets you plan and schedule a whole month of posts across Instagram, Facebook and the rest in one sitting. Preview how your feed will look, schedule your specials, events and behind-the-scenes content to publish automatically, and use its AI for captions and the best times to post.

For a busy operator, that means a consistent, appetising social presence even in the middle of a hectic week — batch your content when you get a quiet half-hour and let it publish itself, keeping you front-of-mind for hungry locals.

AI social content

If the problem isn’t scheduling posts but coming up with them, Predis.ai generates the content itself. Describe your restaurant or a dish and its AI produces ready-to-post social media content — captions, hashtags and graphics or video — tailored to your brand, so you’re never staring at a blank screen wondering what to post today.

For a time-strapped food business, it’s like having a social media assistant that turns out a steady stream of on-brand posts. Pair it with Later to schedule what it creates, and your social channels stay active with very little effort from you.

Email marketing

Your regulars are your most valuable asset, and email is the cheapest way to bring them back. Mailchimp lets you collect customer emails and send polished newsletters — new menus, events, seasonal offers, “we’ve missed you” nudges — with AI that helps write the emails, design them and pick send times, plus automations that fire on autopilot.

For a food business, a well-timed email to your list fills quiet nights and turns one-time visitors into regulars, for a fraction of the cost of chasing new customers through ads. Build the list once and it keeps paying you back.

Reviews & reputation

For restaurants and cafés, online reviews are everything — a strong Google and Tripadvisor rating is often what decides whether a stranger walks in or walks past. NiceJob automates getting them: it sends happy customers a friendly request by text and email, nudges the ones who forget, showcases your best reviews on your website, and its AI can even draft replies.

For an operator who always means to ask for reviews but never does, it quietly builds a steady stream of five-star ratings. That said, review tools shine for follow-up-style contact; many restaurants do brilliantly just by making it easy in-house — a QR code on the receipt or table linking straight to your Google review page costs nothing.