The AI answering service for restaurants that is still picking up at 7:42 PM, mid-rush.

A restaurant answering service is whatever picks up when the host stand cannot. The traditional version is an outsourced call centre: people answering under your name, billed per minute, taking a message for someone to call back. An AI answering service answers instantly, takes every simultaneous caller rather than queueing them, and completes the task instead of writing it down — the table is booked in your book, the takeout order is in the POS, the waitlist text has gone out. The practical difference on a Friday is that a message-taking service hands you eleven callbacks at 9 PM, and this hands you eleven filled seats.

Same software, two halves of the same job. "Receptionist" is the phone side: greeting callers, answering hours, parking, dress code and menu questions, taking messages for the GM, routing the vendor who wants the buyer. "Host" is the book side: availability, turn times, table joins, the waitlist and the cancellation backfill. CallSphere does both from one configuration, which matters because most restaurant calls need both — the caller asks whether you have parking and then asks for a table at 8.

Yes. The agent walks callers through your menu, captures modifications, substitutions and special requests, reads the order back before confirming, and fires it to your POS or kitchen display. Items your manager has 86'd drop out of what it will offer, so it cannot sell a branzino that ran out at seven. Pickup times come from your own quoted lead time rather than a guess, and the confirmation text carries the order number and the time.

All three, against the same availability your host stand sees. It books into live inventory with your turn times and table joins applied, holds an offered slot for the length of the call, and sends the confirmation. When a cancellation lands it records it, then texts the people on your waitlist whose stated party size and time fit the hole — first confirmed reply takes it. Tables you fence off, like the chef's counter or the two-top you keep for regulars, are never offered to anyone.

It answers from your menu and your allergen sheet as written, and it never improvises. Gluten-free, vegetarian and vegan options, preparation methods, and what a dish contains are all fair game when you have documented them. Allergies are deliberately handled differently: the agent records which allergen the guest named, attaches it to the reservation, and routes the question to the kitchen rather than answering it. The FDA recognises nine major food allergens, sesame included since 2023, and cross-contact is a call for your chef, not for software.

It captures the inquiry properly instead of losing it to voicemail, which is where most of them go today. Date, guest count, occasion, budget range, dietary requirements, room preference and a callback number, all structured and routed to whoever owns events. Those are the highest-value calls a restaurant takes and the ones most likely to arrive at 3 PM on a Tuesday when nobody is at the stand.

Yes, and the honest detail is that the depth differs by system. Cloud reservation and POS platforms with real APIs are written to directly, so the caller hears a confirmed table or a confirmed order before hanging up. Anything on an older on-premises setup may need a bridge, in which case the booking is confirmed asynchronously and we tell you that before the pilot rather than after. Ask us which one you are getting, in writing — we would rather lose the deal than have you discover it in week two.

It books against the same availability your host stand sees, with your turn times and table joins already in it. When it offers a slot it holds it for the length of the call, and a waitlist text holds the slot for ten minutes before releasing it. You can fence off tables it may never touch — the chef's counter, the two-top by the window you keep for regulars, the private room — and it will not offer them to anyone.

All three get answered at the same time, on the same first ring. There is no queue and no hold music, because there is no single receptionist to wait for. That is the hour this is actually for: the one where a person at the stand can pick up one line while the other two ring out.

If your POS or menu system exposes it, yes. 86'd items drop out of what the agent will offer or take an order for, within the sync interval you set. If it does not, your manager 86s an item from a phone in one tap and the agent stops offering it immediately. It will never take a takeout order for something the kitchen ran out of at seven.

You do. Everything writes into your reservation platform and your guest profiles, and anything held on our side is exportable at any time and deletable on request. We do not market to your guest list and we do not share it with other restaurants, including the ones down the street from you.

The agent handles 57+ languages and switches to whichever the caller opens in, without being asked and without a menu tree. The booking, the notes and the confirmation text come out in that language. The transcript your manager reads is in English.

It takes the name, the date, the table and what happened, says nothing about who was at fault, offers nothing, and routes it to the manager on duty with the recording attached. If the caller says they got sick, it goes to the GM as a page rather than a message. That is a call the owner takes, not an agent.

Yes. It sits behind your line, so you can flip forwarding off from a phone in seconds, or set it to answer only when the host stand does not pick up in four rings, or only outside your posted hours. Most rooms start with overflow-only for a week, then hand it the whole line once they have read the transcripts.

Two tiers cover almost every room. At $50 a month the agent answers the phone: hours, directions, parking, whether you take walk-ins, and a message taken properly with a callback number. At $149 a month it works the book — reservations into live availability, takeout orders into the POS, waitlist texts, cancellation backfills and write-backs. AI and telephony usage is billed separately at cost, roughly $0.15 a minute inbound, with no markup on top. The seven-day pilot runs on one forwarded line and you keep the recordings either way.

Three things, and the third is the one that changes the math. It answers every simultaneous caller instead of queueing them behind one operator, which is the whole point at 7:30 on a Saturday. It finishes the job — a booked table, an order in the POS — instead of handing you a callback list at the end of service. And the price is flat, so the long calls that actually book something do not cost you more than the wrong numbers. A per-minute service is still the better answer if your calls are low-volume and emotionally complicated; most restaurant calls are neither.

Yes — that is the difference between AI phone answering for restaurants and a message-taking service. The agent reads your live menu, takes the pickup or takeout order with modifiers and allergy notes, reads it back, quotes your own lead time, and fires the ticket to the POS or kitchen display. 86'd items drop out of what it will offer. What it will not do is take a drinks order, clear a dish as allergen-safe, or price a catering job; those go to a person on your floor with the recording attached.

No. You keep your number and forward it — the whole line, overflow only after four rings, or outside posted hours — and you can take it back from a handset in seconds. On day one nothing changes in the POS: reservations and orders can land in a shared queue your manager clears. Direct write-backs to OpenTable, Toast, Square, Clover, Resy, SevenRooms or Tock are switched on once you have read a week of transcripts and want the agent booking straight into the book.