The restaurant that stopped missing phone orders
A busy Soho Italian was losing dinner-rush phone orders every night — staff too slammed to answer. We gave them an AI phone agent that takes orders, answers questions, and collects payment. No new hardware, no app for customers to download.
The problem
This 40-cover trattoria off Old Compton Street does a strong collection and delivery trade — but the same two front-of-house staff who run the floor also answer the phone. During Friday and Saturday service the phone simply rang out. The owner estimated they were losing 10–15 orders a week, and the team was paying a delivery platform over £700 a month in commission for orders they could have taken directly.
In our 15-minute intro call, the owner walked us through a normal service. We mapped three manual processes: answering the phone, keying orders into the till, and chasing card payments over the phone for large collection orders. All three could be automated with one system.
What we built
We deployed an AI phone agent on their existing business number. It answers instantly, in a natural voice, knows the full menu including daily specials, handles common questions ("is the lasagne gluten free?"), takes the order, and sends the customer a payment link by text for prepayment.
Orders land directly on a small kitchen tablet as a printed-style ticket — no re-keying. If a caller asks for something genuinely unusual, the agent takes a message and flags it for a call-back, so nothing weird ever reaches the kitchen unchecked.
- AI voice agent on the existing phone number — no number change, no new hardware
- Menu synced from a simple spreadsheet the owner already keeps
- Payment link by SMS, settled before the order hits the kitchen
- Orders appear on a kitchen tablet in real time
- Weekly summary email: orders taken, revenue, most-asked questions
How it runs day to day
Nobody at the restaurant touches anything technical. The owner updates the specials in the same spreadsheet as before; the agent picks it up within a minute. If the internet goes down, calls fall back to the normal ringing phone. We monitor the whole thing and get alerted before they ever notice a problem.
The outcome
Within two months, answered calls went from roughly half during service to 96% overall, and the restaurant put an extra £3.2k a month through direct phone orders — money that used to go to missed calls and platform commission. Staff no longer stop mid-service to grab the phone, which the owner says has visibly improved table service on busy nights.
Total cost to the restaurant: less than they were paying in delivery-platform commission each month.
“Fridays used to mean the phone ringing out while we plated mains. Now every call gets answered, the order is on the ticket rail, and it’s already paid. It just works.”