AI chatbots for restaurants: what they do and cost
An automated assistant does not bring in new customers. It does one thing, and does it well: it answers the same eight questions that arrive every day, while you are on the floor.
If your problem is empty tables on a Tuesday, a bot is not the answer. If your problem is the phone ringing through service and messages you reply to at midnight, then it is.
The eight questions
In a restaurant, ninety per cent of incoming messages are these, usually in this order: are you open tonight, do you have room for four, where exactly are you, is there parking, do you have gluten-free options, can we bring the dog, do you do takeaway, roughly what does it cost.
These have fixed answers. They need no judgement and they do not need you. That is exactly the work worth handing over.
The questions that stay yours are the others: the table of twenty for a birthday, the complicated allergy, the customer with a complaint. Those go to a person, and they go there immediately.
What it can do, and what to keep away from it
It can answer the eight questions in several languages, collect a booking request complete with date, time, party size and notes, send you the summary, and hold up through a Saturday night service without joining a queue.
Better not to let it confirm tables automatically unless you have a floor management system connected. The risk is promising a seat that does not exist, and recovering from that costs more than the bot ever saved you. It collects the request, you confirm with one tap.
It must not push on when it does not know. An assistant that talks around a question does more damage than a contact form: the customer realises they are talking to a wall and closes the tab. Not knowing is allowed. Failing to hand over is not.
Where it lives: the website or WhatsApp
Two different places with two different economics, and this is where most of the spending mistakes happen.
On the website the assistant is a panel that opens at the bottom right. It answers people who are already reading the menu, and when the conversation turns serious it moves to WhatsApp through an ordinary link. It costs no per-message fee, because technically no paid platform is involved: you are opening a chat the way anyone would.
On WhatsApp, if you want automatic replies inside the app itself, you need the WhatsApp Business Platform, meaning the API. Here the costs are real and come in three parts: Meta's per-conversation fee, around 0.066 euros for utility conversations in Italy, the platform subscription that gives you access, often between 20 and 100 euros a month, and the margin many providers add above Meta's rates.
Worth watching: from 1 October 2026 Meta removes the free tier for service conversations. A business handling three hundred service conversations a month goes from zero to roughly twenty euros a month in Meta fees alone, before the subscription.
For most restaurants the first route is more than enough. The API earns its place when several people answer from the same number, or when message volume justifies a subscription.
The part that makes the difference
It is not the model. It is what the bot knows.
An assistant wired to a menu two seasons out of date answers wrong things confidently, and that is worse than silence. Before switching anything on you need: an up-to-date menu with allergens dish by dish, real opening hours including the special ones, written booking rules, and a defined route for when the bot does not know.
It is the same list a digital menu needs, and that is no coincidence: the allergen duties apply wherever the information reaches the customer, chat included.
How we built ours
The assistant at the bottom right of this site is the same kind of tool we install. It answers in Italian, English and Russian, knows the services and the prices, and when a conversation becomes a concrete request it opens WhatsApp with the message already written. If the connection to the model is missing, it does not return an error: it shows the WhatsApp contact and stops there.
That is the most useful part of the build, and it is worth saying plainly: it would rather admit it does not know than invent. In a restaurant, inventing means telling a coeliac that a dish is fine.
How we work on assistants is described on the AI bots and assistants page; the plans that include the site and the QR menu are on the pricing page.
Frequently asked questions
Can a chatbot take bookings on its own? It can collect the full request: date, time, number of people, notes. Confirming the table is a different matter and is better left to a person, unless you have a floor management system connected to it.
What does the WhatsApp Business API cost? Three lines add up: Meta's per-conversation fee, around 0.066 euros for utility conversations in Italy, the platform subscription, often between 20 and 100 euros a month, and whatever margin the provider adds on top.
Do I need the paid API to answer customers on WhatsApp? No, not if you simply want customers to message you and answer by hand from the app: a wa.me link costs nothing. The API is for automated replies, several operators on one number, or scheduled sends.
Does the chatbot answer in English and Russian too? Yes, and that is where it pays off most: in a tourist area the same question arrives in three languages and the answers never change. On our site the assistant works in Italian, English and Russian.
What happens when the bot does not know? It has to hand over immediately, with the WhatsApp number or the phone. An assistant that talks around the question does more damage than a contact form: the customer realises they are talking to a wall and leaves.