A guest calls at 5:40, right when you're plating the first covers. "Before I book, my son can't have peanuts, and my wife's celiac. Are we okay at your place?" It's a fair question. It's also the fourth time today someone's asked some version of it, and the honest answer takes a minute you don't have.
Allergen questions aren't like "what time do you close." Get closing time wrong and someone shows up early. Get an allergy answer wrong and someone ends up in the ER, and you end up in a story nobody wants to be in. So your crew does the safe thing: they slow down, they check, they walk it back to the kitchen. Ten times a night, that adds up.
Here's the part worth fixing. Most of those questions have the same handful of answers, and you already know them cold. The trouble is that the knowledge lives in your head, or in a line cook's head, or on a laminated card taped to the walk-in. It isn't anywhere a guest can reach at 5:40 without interrupting somebody.
What it does, and where it stops
An allergen assistant is a small text tool that answers a guest's question in plain language, using notes you wrote, and replies in seconds. It can live on your website, answer texts to your main number, or reply to the "any questions?" box on your booking page. A guest types "do you have anything gluten-free," and it tells them, without a single ring on the line.
What it can't do is promise safety. A kitchen with a busy raw bar and a shared fryer can't guarantee zero cross-contact (traces of one food ending up in another), and no software should pretend otherwise. The assistant's job is to handle the routine questions fast and honestly, then get out of the way when a real person needs to weigh in. Owners who try to make it the final word on a severe allergy are asking for trouble, and we tell them so.
Answer from your notes, never from a guess
The one rule that makes this safe is grounding, which just means the assistant only answers from the notes you give it and says "let me check" for anything else. A general chatbot will happily invent an answer about your chowder. One tied to your own menu file won't, because it has nothing to make up from.
So the work up front is writing those notes, once, clearly. For each dish, jot what's in it and what it touches: the calamari's dusted in wheat flour, the chowder's made with real cream, the quahogs come off the same station as the oysters. It's an afternoon of work, and most of it already lives in your recipes.
Then when a guest asks something the notes don't cover, the assistant should say exactly that and offer a callback, not stretch for an answer. A plain "I want to get this right, let me have a manager confirm, what's a good number?" beats a confident wrong reply every time.
Decide what it answers and what it hands to a person
Draw a clear line before you turn it on. Simple, factual, low-risk questions are fair game for an instant reply. Anything involving a severe allergy, a guarantee, or a judgment call goes to a human, every time.
- Instant answers: which dishes are made without gluten, whether the chowder has dairy, if there's a nut-free dessert, what the vegetarian options are.
- Hand to a person: "will my celiac daughter be safe," anything about a life-threatening allergy, requests to modify a dish, and any question where the honest answer is "it depends on tonight's prep."
That second list isn't a failure of the tool. It's the tool doing its most useful thing: catching the question that needs your chef and routing it there fast, with the guest's name and number attached, instead of letting it sit in a voicemail through the dinner rush.
Keep the notes honest as the menu moves
A menu note is only as good as its last update, and specials change daily. The fastest way to make this dangerous is to set it up in April and forget it by August, once the fryer oil, the bread supplier, and half the raw bar have all changed.
Give one person the job of updating the notes whenever the menu does, and make it a thirty-second habit, not a project. When you write the new special on the board, add its allergen line to the file. Some setups let you update by text, so a line cook can send "tonight's gnocchi has egg" and the assistant knows by the next question.
Worth saying plainly: if you can't keep the notes current, switch the assistant off for allergens and let it answer hours and directions instead. Stale allergy info is worse than none.
Worth doing this week
- Write down the five allergen questions you get most, and the honest answer to each. That's your starting notes.
- For your top ten dishes, add one line each: main ingredients, plus what they share a station or a fryer with.
- Decide your hand-off rule now. Our default: anything with the word "allergy" or "safe" goes to a person with a callback.
- Pick who owns updates, and tie it to something you already do (writing the specials board works fine).
- Test it with a real question a guest asked last week, and read the reply out loud. If you'd stand behind it, you're close.
None of this needs to be fancy. A tidy set of notes and a clear line between "answer" and "check" covers most of what walks in the door. If you want a hand wiring it to your phone and booking page, that's the kind of small, local job we like at RI AI Agency.