Case study · Restaurants, Cafés & Breweries
Eagle Valley Eatery
6pm Saturday, the lakeside patio is slammed, and the phone's rung eight times in twenty minutes. Here's the exact stack we'd build — and the sample artifact it produces.
Sicamous · Summer patio · Illustrative composite — the numbers are typical-pattern estimates, not measured results.
Illustrative scenario. Eagle Valley Eatery is a fictional composite of typical restaurant and pub operations in the Sicamous area — not a client account. The numbers are estimates from typical patterns; your audit produces real ones. Founding-client case studies will replace these as they complete.
The day this happens
Saturday, 6pm, in a town that tripled overnight
It's a Saturday in mid-July, 6pm, and Sicamous has tripled in size since May. The Eagle Valley Eatery's lakeside patio is full — houseboat crews in for a proper meal, RV families off the highway, the after-the-lake crowd still in flip-flops, a local craft lager going out to every second table. The host is doing three jobs at once: seating tables, running plates when the kitchen's buried, and reading the wait to the hopeful faces at the door.
And the phone keeps ringing — eight times in the last twenty minutes. "How long's the wait?" "Do you take walk-ins?" "Is our reservation for ten still on?" Every call is thirty seconds the host doesn't have, and every unanswered one is a table of hungry houseboaters deciding to drive to the pub down the road instead. The reservation book is paper, the waitlist is a name scrawled on it, and the only person who knows the real wait time is far too busy to pick up and say it.
This is the whole summer for a town like this — a dozen frantic weekends when the population balloons and every seat matters. Come October it'll be quiet again. But right now, every missed call is a full table's worth of walked business, and the host cannot be in two places at once.
What we built
The second brain for this business.
A front-of-house second brain that answers the phone and runs the waitlist by text, so the host stays where the money is: on the floor.
- AI Receptionist — answers reservation and waitlist calls by phone and SMS in the eatery's voice, so nobody at the host stand has to stop to pick up.
- Workflow Automation — runs the waitlist end to end: adds a party, texts honest live wait-times, pings "your table's ready," and sends a review request the next morning.
- AI Financial Insights — reads supplier invoices and tracks food-and-keg costs, so the busiest month isn't also the blindest one.
The artifact
The artifact: a full patio, and a host who never touched the phone
The star of the study — the same standard as the AI Receptionist sample call, written out line by line.
— Waitlist board (live) · 6:41pm —
• Beck ×4 — table ready, texted 6:14 ✓
• Ferreira ×2 — ~15 min
• Osei ×6 — ~40 min (sent an honest heads-up)
• Farrow ×10→11 — reserved 7:00pm, covered patio
The host touched the phone zero times. Everyone still got an answer.
The outcome
What changes — in typical-pattern estimates.
Illustrative outcomes — typical-pattern estimates, not guarantees or a promise about your restaurant.
| Before | After (typical-pattern estimate) |
|---|---|
| Reservation/waitlist calls the host fields mid-service | all of them → almost none |
| Callers who hang up and drive down the road | the unanswered ones → texted a real wait instead |
| Wait quoted vs. actual | a guess at the door → a live text update |
| Peak-Saturday tables lost to a busy phone | the usual few → aiming for none |
Now a full patio is just a full patio — the phone answers itself, the waitlist runs by text, and the host spends the dinner rush reading the room instead of the reservation book.
Transparent pricing
What it costs to start.
The Eagle Valley stack starts at $3,500 for the AI Receptionist, $2,500 for Workflow Automation, and $3,500 for AI Financial Insights — starting floors, fixed-quoted as one build after a free call. Most kitchens start with the phone and waitlist for summer, then add the numbers side for the off-season. Every build requires a Care Plan, from $299/mo.
Is it worth it for your business? Let's find out — free.
We'll tell you honestly whether it's worth it before your next long weekend.
Prefer to talk now? Call (236) 837-3550 — a real BC-based human picks up. We reply within one business day, usually faster.