For restaurants, cafés and bars

An answering service for restaurants that picks up during the rush

It is seven o'clock, every table is full and the phone by the till has rung four times. Whoever is nearest is plating or pouring, so it rings out — and that takeout order goes to whichever place picked up.

Get your number Hear it answer a call

Live in about ten minutes. From $29 a month. No contract, no setup fee, cancel any time.

The number that matters

Miss eight order calls a week at a $40 average order, and even if only three in ten of those callers would have ordered, that is $416 a month you never saw.

You can check that against your own week. Below is the same sum with your figures in it.

What it's costing you

Do the sum on your own numbers

Set to a typical takeout order. Change it to whatever is true for you.

Calls you miss in a week 8 What an average order is worth $40 Of the callers you do speak to, how many order 30%

Nothing is sent anywhere — the sum happens in your browser. It assumes PhonePick reaches every missed caller, and that they convert like the ones you already speak to. Whether that holds is your call, not ours.

Work walking past you

—

a month, on those numbers

PhonePick, the plan that covers it—

Even if it only saves one in five—

Worth doing?—

What it does

Three things, on every call

It takes the order from your menu

Give it your menu once — a PDF, a photo or a link. Every price comes from the menu, never from its head, and it reads the whole order back with the total and places it only when the caller says yes.

The ticket goes where the kitchen looks

Your Orders screen, a kitchen screen on any tablet and your email — plus a text to the kitchen's phone if you want one.

Tables, paced the way you set them

Switch booking on and it books tables by how many parties and guests may start in each half hour. A party bigger than you allow gets a call back, not a table.

In the US, texting starts once carriers approve your business, which usually takes one to three weeks. Calls are answered from day one.

And it learns. Anything a caller asks that it can't answer is written down for you — add the answer once and the very next caller hears it. It never guesses in the meantime.

Being straight with you

It takes the order. It won't take a card or promise a dish is safe.

It never takes a card number on the phone; it tells callers how you take payment, in your words. It will not answer an allergy or ingredient question — it writes the allergy on the ticket for the kitchen and leaves the answer to you. And orders don't go into your POS: they arrive on your Orders screen, the kitchen screen and your email, not in Toast, Square or Clover.

Before you ask

Restaurants, cafés and bars ask these three

How many order calls will a plan cover?

Plans are minutes, not calls. Starter's 100 minutes is roughly 30 calls, and a busy takeout line will want Busy (300 minutes) or Flat out (650). If the minutes run out it stops answering and calls ring straight through to your own phone — there is never an overage bill.

We already take bookings on OpenTable or Resy. Does it still help?

Yes. It can text callers your booking link instead of booking them itself — it cannot see what those systems have free, so it doesn't pretend to. It still takes the phone orders and answers the other calls.

What does it do when a caller mentions an allergy?

Writes it on the order for the kitchen, in the caller's words — even if they remember it after the order is placed. It will never tell a caller a dish is safe or what is in it; that answer stays with you.

Everything else people ask →