AI for restaurant owners: 8 prompts that run on a $20 plan, not a $399 one

How can I use AI in my restaurant?

Use AI in your restaurant for the writing first, because that is the work it does well today and the work operators already give it. The National Restaurant Association's 2026 State of the Restaurant Industry puts it plainly: "26% of operators say their restaurants use AI-related tools." Marketing leads at 17% of operators, administrative tasks follow at 10%, and reservations and inquiries, the job the $399-a-month voice bots sell, sit at 5%. The same report says 42% of operators were not profitable in 2025, which is the budget this page is written for.

So the order below is the report's order: menu copy and captions, then the admin, then the jobs that need a dedicated tool. Each has a prompt you can paste into GPT, Claude or Gemini. The first one we ran on 27 September 2026 through Claude Haiku 4.5 (fal's any-llm endpoint, temperature 0.3), and the output is shown as it came back.

```

Rewrite these three menu items as menu descriptions for a neighbourhood Italian restaurant in Boston. Rules: under 14 words each, name the main ingredients in plain words, no adjectives like delicious, mouthwatering, exquisite or perfect, no exclamation marks, do not add any claim about allergens, gluten, or where an ingredient came from unless it is in my notes. Return only the three descriptions.

1. Rigatoni with sausage ragu. Notes: pork and fennel sausage, San Marzano tomatoes, pecorino.
2. Grilled branzino. Notes: whole fish, lemon, salsa verde, roast potatoes.
3. Tiramisu. Notes: made in house, espresso, mascarpone, cocoa.

```

Output, unedited: "Rigatoni with pork and fennel sausage, San Marzano tomatoes, pecorino." "Grilled whole branzino with lemon, salsa verde, roast potatoes." "House-made tiramisu with espresso, mascarpone, cocoa."

Three descriptions of 6 to 10 words, nothing invented. It kept "made in house" as "House-made", and it added no farm, no "gluten-free", no "fresh". That last rule matters more than the style rules, and the allergen section below says why. The prompt works because the notes are yours; strip them out and any model fills the gap with "succulent".

Which AI is best for restaurant business?

For the writing jobs, the best AI for a restaurant is whichever $20-class chat plan you will open every day: the GPT, Claude and Gemini families all handle the menu prompt above, and none of them knows your restaurant until you paste it in. For answering the phone, seating the room and posting review replies at volume, the best AI is a tool built into that job, and those are priced very differently. We checked nine restaurant AI tools against their own pricing pages on 27 September 2026, in US dollars.

Five of the nine restaurant tools publish no price at all. Of the four that do, the cheapest plan with a named AI feature is Sling Business at $4 per user, the cheapest per location is Homebase Plus at $70, and AI phone answering starts at $399 per location, 20 times Claude Pro. None of the nine writes your menu, your job ad or your supplier email. That gap is what the chat plan fills, and it is the reason marketing is the NRA's top AI category while reservations is its bottom one.

The 26% figure mixes independents with chains, and the tool prices show who they were built for. Deloitte's survey of 375 restaurant executives in 11 countries, fielded in late 2024 and published in June 2025, found 82% planning to raise AI spending in the next fiscal year. Those are the buyers of the quote-only rows. The chat plan is priced for the other 74% of operators.

Whizi, which publishes this page, is the last row: ChatGPT Luna, Claude Haiku and the house model on Starter, Claude Sonnet, Claude Opus and Gemini from Pro, the rest of the 280+ catalogue on Powerhouse, web search on by default, all as of October 2026. Where it loses to everything above it: no POS, reservation book or review-site integration, so every draft is copied out by hand, and a place answering 30 reviews a week is better served by Birdeye's quote than by any chat window. Where it fits is the eight prompts on this page, which need a text box and your facts.

What prompts cover reviews, captions, job ads, rotas and supplier emails?

Five prompts cover the rest of the writing, and each works the way the menu prompt does: your facts in, the model's fluency out, and a rule against inventing. Fill the brackets, paste, then cut anything the model added that you did not tell it.

Reviews. The AI response to a bad review page has the full prompt and seven filled replies, so the short form here: paste the review, write two lines on what actually happened, name what you can offer, cap it at 100 words and sign with your first name. When we checked on 26 September 2026 for that page, Google's reply tips and Yelp's review-reply policy never mentioned AI, and both ruled out sending everyone the same words. Edit before you post.

Captions, for the week's posts in one go.

```

Write 5 Instagram captions for [restaurant], a [cuisine] place in [neighbourhood]. This week: [the special, the event, the new hours]. Each under 25 words, one plain fact per caption, no hashtags in the text (list 5 at the end), no emoji, none of these words: foodie, indulge, curated, heavenly. Vary the opening word so no two captions start the same way.

```

Job ads. The full method, with what the ad must say about pay, is in AI to write a job description.

```

Write a job ad for a [line cook / server] at [restaurant], [neighbourhood]. Facts: $[x] to $[y] an hour plus tips, [n] shifts a week including [days], start [date], the kitchen in two lines: [what you cook, how many covers a night], apply by emailing [address]. Under 200 words. State the pay in the first three lines. None of these words: "rockstar", "family", "passionate".

```

Rotas. The model does the arithmetic of availability, and it does not know your state's break, overtime or scheduling-notice rules; check those yourself, or note that Homebase's $120 All-in-One plan lists HR and compliance tools where a chat model lists none.

```

Draft next week's rota from this availability table and these shifts.

[paste: name, role, days available, max hours, requested days off]

[paste: shift, day, start, end, roles needed]

Rules: nobody over their max hours, at least two servers on Friday and Saturday dinner, no split shifts. Output a table by day, then list every shift you could not fill and every person under 20 hours.

```

Supplier emails, where the facts are invoice numbers and dates and the ask is one sentence.

```

Write an email to [supplier] about [three short deliveries this month / a 12% rise on chicken with no notice]. Facts: [dates, invoice numbers, the agreed price]. Ask for [a credit of $x / the agreed price until 1 November / a call this week]. Under 150 words, no apology from me, one clear ask, polite. Sign as [name], [restaurant].

```

One rule for all five: the review text, the applicant's details and the supplier's invoice are business records, so paste what the prompt needs and nothing more. What never to paste into AI draws the line.

Can AI answer allergen and menu labeling questions?

No. It can find and quote the rule, and it cannot be the source of it, because an allergen error is a medical event and the rule that binds you is set by your state or city code, which a model has no reason to know and which changes. Four federal facts, read at the FDA on 27 September 2026, frame the question, and none of them came from a model.

The nine major food allergens are milk, eggs, fish, crustacean shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat, soybeans and sesame, with sesame added on 1 January 2023 under the FASTER Act. The packaged-food labeling law does not reach your menu: the FDA says it enforces FALCPA "in most packaged food products" and lists what it does not cover, ending with "most foods sold at retail or food service establishments that are not pre-packaged with a label." Calorie counts on menus are required only of "a chain with 20 or more locations." And the FDA Food Code, the model that state and local restaurant codes are built on, is "offered for adoption by local, state, and federal governmental jurisdictions", so the enforceable text is your state's or city's version of it, and the prompt has to ask for that one.

```

Find the current food allergen rules for restaurants in [state or city]. Use web search. For each point give the exact quote, the section number and the URL of the government page it came from. Cover: whether a menu allergen notice is required, whether staff allergen training or a certified manager is required, and what the nine federal major allergens are. If you cannot find an official government source for a point, say so instead of guessing.

```

Then open every URL it gives you; a model with web search on returns real pages most of the time and a confident paraphrase some of the time, and only the page settles it. On the question of what a dish contains, the model has nothing at all: your recipe, your supplier's spec sheet and the cook who swapped the oil know that. Keep allergen claims out of every prompt on this page, which is why the menu prompt forbids them.

How do you translate a menu with AI?

Translate a menu with a glossary in the prompt and a second model reading it back, and never let the translator rename a dish. The dish name stays in the original language with the translated description under it; the mistakes worth fearing are in ingredients and cooking methods, and a round trip through a second model catches most of them.

```

Translate this menu into [Spanish]. Keep every dish name in Italian exactly as written and put the translated description under it. Use these terms every time: [ragu = ragú, not salsa boloñesa; branzino = lubina]. Translate ingredients and cooking methods literally; do not add, drop or soften any ingredient. Return a two-column table: original, translation.

```

Then paste the translation, alone, into a different model with one line: "Translate this back into English literally." Any ingredient or method that changed on the way back is a line to fix by hand; a "grilled" that returns as "roasted" or a "pecorino" that returns as "parmesan" is the kind of drift that matters on a menu. Use AI to translate covers which model families hold up in which languages. For a 40-line menu the whole job is two prompts and one read-through.

The rule for the whole page is the NRA's chart. If the job is words, a $20 chat plan does it today, and the restaurant version of AI for small business owners is mostly the same prompts with a menu attached. If the job is a phone ringing at seven on a Saturday, pay the $399 or hire a host, because no prompt picks up.