Restaurants
The phone rings at the host stand while you walk a six to table twelve.
It puts tonight's covers in the book.
It picks up on the fourth ring, when the stand is three deep, puts the covers in the book you're already looking at, and never confirms a table it can't see.
Free for 14 days. No card needed.
“Have you got a table for four tonight? Any time, really — we're not fussy.”
Checks the book before it says a word, offers only the times it actually has free, and texts her the one she takes with the street name. If tonight is committed it says so and offers the waitlist.
The phone rings at the host stand while you walk a six to table twelve.
Their words
Say it the way your callers say it, and watch what it reaches for
The agent has fourteen tools. It has the same fourteen on every one of these pages — what changes with your trade is which one a sentence lands on, and how much of the job is done by the time it puts the phone down.
It hears
“table for four tonight, not fussy”
It reaches for
check_availability
She's ringing down a list of four places. It looks at the book before it says a word.
The words on those chips are the trade’s, not ours: covers, the book, sitting, fully committed, turn the table, dietaries. Get one of them wrong on the phone and the person on the other end knows within a sentence.
Run it
Every line on the job card came from a second you can point at
One call, on a rail. Drag it forward and it fills in. Drag it back and it comes apart — the slot empties, the tool leaves the log, and the confirmation un-writes itself.
Agent
Rossiter's — this is the answering assistant. Yanna's got a queue at the stand, so you've got me. What can I do for you?
Tools it ran
- Nothing yet — it is still listening.
Booking slip
- Covers
- SittingPro · Google Calendar connected
- Dietaries
- In the bookPro · Google Calendar connected
Six covers at quarter to nine. The birthday's with the floor, and nobody on the phone told her what's in the food.
Played back in 14 seconds, or listen to the whole call (0:58) at its own pace. The clock on the rail keeps the written call’s time.
Build this agentThe wall
It will not tell a caller a dish is safe for their allergy
Lean on it. The words change as the caller pushes; the answer does not. Push all the way and the only thing that gives is that it stops arguing and fetches a person.
Pressure 1 of 4
Caller
“My daughter's got a nut allergy. Is that going to be a problem with your kitchen?”
Agent
I'll put the nut allergy on the booking now, and the kitchen will go through the menu with you before you order. I can't tell you what's in a dish myself.
An allergy that needs an answer rather than a note goes to a person while the caller is still on the line. It never offers to check and ring back, because by then she has booked somewhere that picked up.
The relay
The duty manager, or whoever you marked for transfers knows in 8 seconds
Two calls stop being bookings the moment they start. Someone who says they were ill after eating with you, and anyone who says they are the press, environmental health, trading standards or a solicitor. Neither gets an apology, a refund or a word about what they ate. The duty manager's phone buzzes with the facts first, so she is not hearing it cold when the call lands a second later — and the insurer gets a call nobody has already half-answered. Nobody is asked to leave a message: a complaint that goes to voicemail is a complaint that goes to Google instead.
0.0s
The caller is still talking. They never hear a hold, and they are never told to ring back.
Your rules
It starts briefed for your trade. The brief is yours to change.
Your trade decides what it knows on day one. You decide the rest — and every line you change shows up in how the next call goes, not in a settings page nobody reads.
Nothing over eight covers without me
A nine goes from a booking to a brief: covers, date, dietaries, pre-order, and your callback — it books none of it.
No booking after 21:15 — that's the last sitting
Past the last sitting it stops offering tonight and puts her down for the next service instead of a table the kitchen can't cook.
Offer the waitlist when we're committed
Off. The call goes ahead without it.
Same agent, your vocabulary. The trade seeds the prompt; everything after that is yours, and you can read the whole of it in the dashboard rather than guessing at what it was told.
Go live
A number of its own, briefed for your trade, this afternoon
Everything on this page works on some plan. Here is exactly which, so nothing you just watched turns out to be behind a wall you did not know about.
On any plan
Nothing to connect beyond saving a contact and adding your documents.
- Writes down the details you asked for
- Tells your team, during the call
- Answers questions from your own documents
- Takes a message, in the caller's words
- Puts the caller through to a person
- Knows the date, your hours and the caller's number
Starter — $49 a month
Needs a text-capable number on your account.
- Texts the caller a confirmation
Pro — $249 a month
Needs Google Calendar connected. Until it is, these calls become messages instead.
- Reads your real diary before it offers anything
- Finds an existing booking to change
- Cancels and frees the slot
- Holds someone for a cancellation
- Puts the job in the calendar
Your agent gets a new number; we cannot port your existing one, so the new number sits alongside your line and you forward to it when you are ready. Local numbers only — no mobile or toll-free yet.
What you just proved
Six claims. You operated the ones that are filled in.
- Three kinds of call come in, and it knows which is whichTry it
- It understands how your callers actually talkTry it
- Every line on the paperwork came from a second of the callTry it
- It will not say the thing that would land you in troubleTry it
- When it can't finish a call, a person knows while the caller is still thereTry it
- The brief is yours to changeTry it
The one we did not demonstrate
About one call in seven goes unanswered while you're open
Our figure, not a study. Our estimate, and it counts open hours only. Revmo AI recorded 12,091 restaurant calls and put full-service misses at 9.0%; we've adjusted that up for a one-line independent where nobody's actual job is the phone. Inside Friday six-to-eight it is far worse than one in seven — Maple's installed base ran at a third of calls missed at peak, and those are sites that bought the product because they already knew. Every call that lands on your closed day, or in the 3-to-5 changeover with the door locked, is missed outright: a separate and much bigger number, which we are not blending in to make either one look dramatic. A missed Tuesday lunch call and a missed Friday-at-seven call are not the same loss, and a single percentage is built to hide exactly that.
Around $24 for each call you get back
Our figure, not a study. Built from the call mix, not the best case. Of a hundred recovered calls roughly thirty-eight are booking calls, about three-quarters of those end in a booking, and an average party of 2.8 covers at a $34 head spend is worth something like $86 once no-shows are taken off. Add the collection orders and a badly-converting slice of large-group enquiries. Count the hours, directions, parking and lost-property calls at nothing, because that is what they are worth. Then take a quarter off the lot, because some of the people you missed rang back, booked online or walked in anyway. We stop at the per-call figure. Turning it into a week or a year needs a call count we do not have and would be guessing at.
- Full-service restaurants miss fewer calls than the headline figures suggest — and the callers who do wait don't wait long.
- Revmo AI, State of Restaurant Calls 2026, 2026-08-20. 12,091 recorded calls with the method stated and split by segment — full-service 9.0% missed, fast casual 24.8%, QSR 40.1%, pizza 6.9%; callers abandoned after an average of 5.5 rings, and average hold at full-service was 73 seconds. Revmo AI sells AI phone answering to restaurants.
- The miss rate that matters is the peak-hour one, and it looks nothing like the all-hours average.
- Maple, restaurant phone data from its own installed base, 2025-12. 1.2 million calls at more than 1,000 US restaurant locations, December 2023 to November 2025; 33% of calls missed during peak hours, 42% of callers abandoning before the vendor's system went in, and an average call length of 1 minute 45 seconds. Maple sells restaurant phone answering, and every location in the sample is one that bought it — read the pre-install figures as the strongest version of the case for the product.
Questions
What restaurants owners ask first
Hospitality is the voice that answers the phone. Someone rings my place, gets a robot, and my whole brand's gone in four seconds — and then it double-books my Saturday and I've got two sixes at the door at eight and one of them's going on Google.
He is right about the voice, which is why it is not the first thing anyone hears. It picks up on the fourth ring, or when the line is engaged, or when the door is locked — never in front of a host who could have got there. So the comparison isn't the agent against Yanna on the door. At 7:40 on a Friday the comparison is the agent against seventeen rings, an engaged tone, or a voicemail nobody plays back until twenty to midnight, by which time the caller wanted a table at eight and it is over. On the double-booking: it writes into the calendar the floor is looking at, or it doesn't confirm at all — it takes the request, says plainly on the call that you'll confirm, and leaves it with whoever has the book. And the part we'll concede on the page: it will not sell the room. It will never hear that the caller is nervous about a first date and put them on the window table. That is the argument for letting it have the parking calls, and for keeping your host free for the ones that matter.
Will it tell someone a dish is gluten-free?
No, and there is no version of this where it does. It records the allergy against the booking in the caller's words, says plainly that the kitchen will confirm, and puts her through to a person if she needs the answer now. It will not even repeat your own menu wording back at her, because a phone line is distance selling: allergen information has to be available before the order is concluded and given again at handover, and whoever says it, the restaurant carries the liability.
Can it double-book my Saturday?
It books into the connected calendar the floor is looking at, or it does not confirm at all. Where there's no live availability it takes the request as a message, tells the caller straight on the call that the restaurant will confirm, and leaves it with whoever has the book. It cannot ring her back later and it doesn't pretend it will. An honest "someone will come back to you" has never put two sixes at the door at eight.
What about deposits on the big tables?
It never takes a card number, an expiry or a CVV. Card details spoken down a phone are a MOTO transaction and drag the whole call into PCI scope, which is a problem you do not want and we do not want. If you've given it a deposit link it texts that; otherwise the manager takes the deposit the way they always have.
Will it take a collection order?
Yes, at the caller's pace, including the twenty seconds where she asks Wes what he wanted. It reads the order back and leaves it for the kitchen as a message. What it will not do is quote her a collection time, because it cannot see how deep the pass is at half seven — the kitchen gives her that, not the phone. It will not take a drinks order for collection either, and it will not confirm anybody's age: alcohol is licence-bound and time-bound and a phone cannot check a date of birth.
Someone rings asking whether a named guest is in tonight.
It doesn't answer that, for anyone, for any reason — not the table, not the time, not who they're with. It takes a message and leaves the decision to a person. Most of those calls are harmless. The ones that are not are the reason this is a rule rather than a judgement call.
Start
Put it on your restaurants line
Fourteen days free, no card. Point your calls at it when you are ready, and take them back the moment you are not.
It answers on the first ring and tells the caller it is an assistant.
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