AI for restaurants: reservations, allergens and responses to reviews

The AI for restaurants gives the best on three jobs that are repeated every evening: take reservations that arrive while the room is full, answer those who ask if a dish contains gluten or nuts, prepare the answers to reviews after closing. An assistant connected to the management software of the tables and to the allergen card of the room alone closes the simple requests and passes the others to those in the room, with the data already collected.

Two things remain outside its perimeter. It does not decide what is in a dish: it reads what the kitchen has put in writing, because for dishes served the Italian norm asks that allergens result from written documentation even when communicating them with a digital system (Legislative Decree 231/2017, art. 19). And it does not ask for reviews by promising something in return, a practice that since April 7, 2026 makes the review illegal.

Who takes reservations when the room is full

Requests for a table come at the worst times: at eight and a half in the evening, when those who answer the phone are the same person who brings the dishes, or at closed premises, on WhatsApp and in Instagram messages. An AI assistant can take them for you on one condition: read the availability from the booking manager and register the table there, instead of keeping an agenda of his own. Without that connection he promises places that don't exist.

In the room availability does not coincide with the number of seats. Count the turn, the inner room or the dehors, the tables that you can join, the time you leave at each table before the second round. The more rules you write, the more requests the assistant closes alone, and what isn't written goes to a person. For calls the pattern is that of a AI switchboard, for the vocal part and confirmations find the details in the guide to telephone reservations with AI.

The writer must know that on the other side there is software. Article 50 of the AI Act It obliges those who provide systems that communicate with people to design them so that the user knows they are talking to an artificial intelligence, and the rule applies from August 2, 2026. In the first message a sentence is enough, along with the quickest way to reach someone from the local; the other obligations for a small business are summarized in AI Act for an SME.

Missing presentations: confirmation, waiting list and deposit

The booked table that remains empty on Saturday night is a dry loss, because you denied it to someone else. The simplest remedy is a message the day before, or the very morning for lunch, with two possible answers: I confirm, I don't come anymore. Those who cancel free the place in time, and the assistant proposes it to those who had asked that night and had remained on the waiting list.

An example: a country trattoria with only one evening shift and the waiting list written on a notebook. On Friday late in the morning the assistant sends confirmation to the evening tables, two customers cancel and the system writes to the top two on the list, who have an hour to respond before the table moves on to the next name. The holder finds the result in the management software without having made a phone call.

On WhatsApp the confirmation of a reservation is a service message and uses a different model from that of promotions; as you get approved the two types explains the guide to WhatsApp Business templates. The distinction also weighs on privacy. The number left for the table serves to the reservation, while announcing on WhatsApp the fish evening is commercial communication: the Art. 130 of the Privacy Code subject to consent promotional communications sent by e-mail, SMS or "other" messages. Consent is asked separately and is not obtained from the reservation.

For evenings when an empty table costs more, such as New Year's Eve or a large table, you can ask for a deposit.Art. 1385: if the person who paid it does not comply with the agreement, the other party can withdraw and hold it; if the person who received it is missing, the customer can withdraw and ask for double. Conditions are communicated before payment, with the same text for everyone. Have your counselor write it down and leave the assistant only the task of sending it along with the link.

"Does ragù have gluten?": allergens, menus and takeaway orders

For the dishes you serve, telling which allergens they contain is an obligation. The EU Regulation 1169/2011 includes restaurants among "mass caterers", requires allergen information even for non-prepacked foods (Article 44), and lists 14 groups in Annex II, from cereals containing gluten to molluscs. The list includes tree nuts, including cashews, but not pine nuts: if the chef changes the pesto recipe, the answer given at the table also changes.

The Italian standard establishes how to do it. The Art. 19, paragraph 8, of Legislative Decree 231/2017 wants an indication ‘reducible to each food’, provided before the dish is served, on a menu, register, sign ‘or other equivalent system, including digital’. With a digital system the same information must result from a written documentation easy to find, for the customer and for those who do the checks; alternatively the menu refers to the staff, who respond on the basis of that documentation. Anyone who omits the indication risks a penalty from 3,000 to 24,000 euros (Art. 23).

For an AI assistant, this all comes down to one rule: it answers by reading the allergen sheet you have written dish by dish, and nothing else. A model left unconstrained reconstructs the “typical” ragù recipe and gets it wrong precisely for the dish your kitchen prepares in its own way, through the mechanism described in the guide to hallucinations of AI. If the dish is missing in the card, or the question is about contamination, the assistant says so and calls someone.

Also watch out for a phrase: ‘gluten-free’. The EU Regulation 828/2014 allows it only if the gluten content of the food sold to the consumer does not exceed 20 mg/kg, a value that also depends on the processing in the kitchen and the shared oven. The assistant can report that a dish has no gluten ingredients according to the card, while the demand of a celiac customer always goes to a person.

Then think of a pizzeria that receives dozens of takeaway orders on WhatsApp on Friday evening. This is distance selling, and for non-prepacked food Regulation 1169/2011 requires mandatory information, including allergens, to be available "before the purchase is concluded" (Article 14). The assistant collects the pizza choices and pickup time, provides a link to each pizza’s information sheet before asking for confirmation, and forwards off-menu requests, such as lactose-free dough, to the pizza maker. It replies to tourists in their language, as in the Multi-language automatic messages, as long as the translation starts from the Italian card and does not add anything.

HACCP register: what an assistant in the kitchen can do

Hygienic self-control is not delegated to a software. The EC Regulation 852/2004 calls, in Article 5, for permanent procedures based on HACCP principles: identifying hazards and critical control points, setting critical limits, monitoring them, establishing corrective actions, verifying that the system is functioning and keeping ‘documents and records appropriate to the nature and size of the food business’. The plan, the limits and the corrective actions you write them, with those who follow you for self-control.

An assistant helps on the part that jumps in full weeks: remind those who open the kitchen to write down the temperatures of refrigerators and blaster, collect the readings in a single register, alert the manager when a value comes out of the limits set in the plan, check that deliveries of suppliers have been recorded. It does not decide whether a product should be thrown away, because that establishes it the corrective action written in the plan and applies it to a person. Keep this feature separate from the customer chatbot, with different logins.

Reviews: what changes with the law 34/2026

From 7 April 2026 reviews of restaurants and tourist facilities have their own law. The Law 34/2026, Art. 19 consider a review lawful if it comes within 30 days of the meal, from those who have actually used the service, and if it is not the result of "discounts, benefits or other utility" promised by the local or its intermediaries. Proof of a tax document, such as a receipt or invoice, is presumed to be authentic and is no longer lawful after two years from publication. Article 20 prohibits buying or selling reviews, including between entrepreneurs and intermediaries.

Two rules follow for anyone automating this process. The message inviting a review the following day thanks the customer and includes the link, without a free dessert or discount on the next dinner. Reviews that fail to meet the requirements, such as those from someone who has never visited or those published years ago, can be reported to the platform with a request for removal under the procedure in Article 16 of the European Digital Services Regulation, referred to by Article 19 itself. The assistant prepares the list with the dates; the legal representative or their delegate signs the report.

In the answers the AI serves because each review deserves a different sentence than the usual "thanks for the feedback". The demo for Respond to Google reviews with AI He writes a draft tailored to each and, in front of a critique, stops: he prepares a track and asks for a person to intervene. In a restaurant add a rule about personal data: the answer does not reveal who the customer was with, what time he booked or what he ordered, if he did not write it.

Where a restaurant assistant makes mistakes most often

• It answers about allergens from the wrong source: a recipe found on the net, or a card that remained stationary at last season's menu.
• It reads a hand-copied appointment calendar instead of the business management software, and on Saturday two groups turn up for the same table.
• He promises the dehors without knowing what to do if it rains, and the client arrives convinced to dine outdoors.
• Translate the menu by adding words, such as ‘vegan’ for a dish with butter or ‘gluten free’ for a pizza baked in the oven of all the others.
• Use the list of reservations for the newsletter without separate consent.
• It does not leave a path to a person, when someone with a serious allergy or a problem with the order must be able to talk to someone right away.

Where to start: the allergen card before the chatbot

The first job is not technical. Before any assistant the restaurant must have in writing what the assistant will have to read, and decided who will update it.

• An allergen card for each dish and for each basic preparation (funds, sauces, doughs), with the date of the last modification and the name of who made it.
• The rules of the tables: shifts, halls, dehors with the plan for bad weather, threshold beyond which a group is managed by voice.
• The text of the conditions of the deposit, written with your advisor, and the list of evenings when you ask for it.
• The list of what always passes to a person: serious allergies and celiac disease, complaints, private events, requests from journalists.
• The consent to promotions, collected separately from the reservation, if you want to write to customers for special evenings.
• A verification of what your booking management software already does: if confirmation and waiting list are there, use those and put the AI where the management software stops, i.e. in freely written messages and drafts of response to reviews.

The picture for catering and hospitality is on the page AI for tourism and hospitality. If you want to start with table confirmations or questions about allergens, Giallo Studio connects the first stream to the management software you already use and tests it for a few weeks on a single service before extending it.