Every restaurant owner asks a vendor the same thing first, which is whether it can take bookings. The honest answer has two halves, and a vendor who gives you only the first half is setting you up for a bad Saturday. A restaurant chatbot can take a reservation request and get it to your staff with everything they need. It cannot see your floor plan, hold a table or promise a time. This guide lays out both halves, question by question.
The short version
Can do, from your own website pages, at any hour and in the guest's language:
- Answer menu, price and dietary questions as your published menu describes them
- Give hours, holiday closures, address, parking and how to find you
- Explain your reservation policy, deposit rules for large groups, and walk-in rules
- Take a reservation request with date, time, party size and contact details, and pass it to staff
- Capture private dining, large-party and event enquiries with the detail a manager needs
- Take a complaint and get it in front of a manager with the guest's details
- Hand a live chat to a staff member who is on duty in the dashboard
Cannot do, and should never pretend to:
- See live table availability or confirm a booking
- Take payments or deposits
- Guarantee a dish is safe for a serious allergy
- Change an order or a booking that already exists
- Write into your reservation system or point-of-sale
Menu and dietary questions
Most restaurant chat traffic is menu questions from people deciding whether to come. Is there a vegan main or just a side salad. Is the set menu available on Saturday. Can the risotto be made without parmesan.
The assistant answers from the menu you publish. If your menu is a PDF, upload it as text too, because a phone screen and a PDF do not get on. Mark dishes clearly with what they are (vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free as served) and the assistant will relay exactly that. Menu questions that should never reach your front of house has example answers worth copying onto your menu page.
Allergies have a hard edge. The assistant can say what your allergen matrix says. It must not say a dish is safe for someone with a severe allergy, because that depends on the kitchen on the night.
Guest: Is the mushroom risotto gluten-free? Assistant: The menu marks the mushroom risotto as gluten-free as served. If this is for a coeliac diner or a serious allergy, I would rather the kitchen confirms than guess, so I can pass your question and contact details to the team and they will come back to you before your visit. Would you like me to do that?
Hours, location and the small stuff
Opening hours, last orders, whether the kitchen closes before the bar, Sunday hours, the bank holiday Monday, where to park, whether there is step-free access and a highchair. None of these needs a person and all of them interrupt service when they come in by phone. Keep one page with hours and practical details, update it when something changes, and the assistant will give the same answer to everyone.
Private dining and large-party enquiries
These are worth more than any single table. A hen party of fourteen, an office Christmas lunch, a fortieth birthday wanting the back room, a wake.
The assistant answers what your website says about the private room, capacity, minimum spend and set menus, then captures the rest: date, headcount, occasion, budget notes, dietary needs, and the organiser's name, email and phone. That lands with your events person as a numbered ticket. Private dining enquiries worth more than a busy Friday explains why those enquiries deserve a faster reply than they usually get.
How a reservation request is captured and confirmed by staff
Date, time, party size, a second-choice time, any occasion or seating request, then a name and mobile number. The assistant tells the guest plainly that the team will check the book and confirm, and the request goes to the inbox as a ticket.
A staff member then looks at the book, picks the slot and replies to the guest. The gain is not that the step disappears. It is that the request arrived complete, at ten past eleven when nobody was answering anything, and the morning person works through a tidy list rather than a voicemail backlog. If the first-choice time is gone, the second choice is already there, so the reply is "we can do 19.45" instead of "sorry, full".
Set the wording yourself. "I have passed your request to the team and they will confirm by phone or email" is right. "Your table is booked" is wrong, because it is not.
Complaints and when to hand over
A complaint arriving through the website is a chance to keep a guest, and a chatbot handling it badly loses them twice. The assistant's job is narrow: acknowledge, apologise without arguing, take the details (date of visit, what happened, name and contact) and get the ticket to a manager marked as a complaint. It should not offer refunds, vouchers or explanations. Handling complaints through your restaurant website walks through the follow-up.
Hand-over works in two modes. During service, anyone logged into the dashboard can step into the chat and the guest sees a person join. After close, the assistant takes details and opens a ticket. Decide which questions always go to a person (serious allergy, complaint, group over a set size, anything about money) and which can wait until morning.
A Friday evening, worked through
Illustrative only. Say a 60-cover neighbourhood bistro has the assistant live on its website on a Friday.
- 17.10: four menu questions about vegan mains, the kids' menu and the Friday set menu, all answered from the menu page.
- 18.30: a reservation request for two at 20.00 tonight. Ticket opened. The host, between seatings, sees it on the tablet and replies that 20.15 is available.
- 19.20: "is the kitchen open until 22.00 on Fridays". Answered. The phone did not ring.
- 19.45: a guest with a shellfish allergy asks about the paella. The assistant relays the allergen note, routes it to the kitchen, ticket marked urgent. The chef replies at 19.52.
- 20.40: an enquiry about the back room for 18 people in three weeks. Headcount, date, budget notes and contact captured. The manager reads it on Saturday morning.
- 22.15: a complaint about a slow table earlier in the evening. Acknowledged, details taken, ticket to the manager, no excuses offered.
- 23.30 to 01.00: three reservation requests for next weekend. Waiting in the inbox for the morning.
The host dealt with one reservation during service in about forty seconds. Everything else either answered itself or waited politely. That is the realistic shape of what a restaurant chatbot does: not a head waiter, but a very good front-of-house assistant who never guesses.
It will not confirm a table, because it cannot see your book, and it will not take a deposit, because a chat window is the wrong place for card details. Neither limit costs you much. The expensive thing was the enquiry nobody picked up at ten past eleven, and that is the one it fixes.
Where SpideyChat fits
SpideyChat for restaurants reads your menu, hours and policy pages, answers guests at any hour in their own language, captures reservation requests and private dining enquiries with name, email and phone, and lets a staff member on duty take over a chat. The Free plan runs one chatbot on one website with no card. Pro at $29.99 a month adds the support ticket inbox for complaints and group enquiries. See the pricing page for the detail.