The AI menu for restaurants — with a maître d’ and a sommelier inside it
One QR code on the table. Behind it, your real dishes at your real prices — plus Restaurant Buddy, who asks two questions and names the dish, then pours the right glass next to it. It answers in the guest’s own words, in 6 languages, and it never invents a plate you don’t serve.
- Your PDF menu, converted for you. Upload the carte you already print and it comes back as an editable AI menu.
- A waiter for the undecided table. Buddy composes the order — starter, main, dessert, drink — with the total, from what you actually have on.
- A sommelier on every cover. It learns your wine list — colour, grape, structure — and pairs from it, or says honestly that nothing on the list fits.
Nothing for your guests to install. Nothing for you to plug in either — no AI account, no key, no per-token bill.
Your old PDF menu becomes an AI menu in one upload
The reason most venues never go digital is the typing. So don’t type. Hand over the carte you already print — the PDF from your designer, or three photos taken on your phone — and get back dishes, sections, prices and allergen fields you can edit.
- 1
Upload the carte
PDF or photos of the pages, up to 4 MB per import. A long menu goes in a few pages at a time.
- 2
The AI reads it
Dish names, descriptions, prices and courses come back as rows. It detects the menu’s language and suggests a template that matches the kind of house you run.
- 3
You approve, then print once
Fix anything that read wrong, publish, print the QR for the tables. Changing a price after that never means reprinting.
A PDF is a photograph of a menu. This is a menu that answers.
A PDF pinches and zooms, weighs two megabytes on hotel Wi-Fi, and cannot tell a guest which of your forty dishes is the one without dairy. Once the same carte is data, it can be filtered, searched, translated, repriced and recommended — and the QR you glued to the table keeps working through every seasonal change.
- Up to 400 dishes on Restaurant, 500 on Business.
- Sold-out and seasonal items hidden in one tap, and never suggested while hidden.
- Photos, sections, allergen and dietary labels per dish.
Your best waiter, at every table at once
Half the table already knows. The other half scrolls, gives up, and orders the safest thing on the page. Buddy talks to that half — what are you in the mood for, what are you avoiding, what do you want to spend — and comes back with one composed answer: the dishes, the drink, the total, and the reason.
And it is your judgement doing the recommending. You mark the chef’s picks and the bestsellers; Buddy leans on them. Between two dishes a guest would equally enjoy, the one you want to move is the one that gets named — decided once, in your settings, instead of depending on who is on shift.
- Guests can simply write it: “nothing with fish, something savoury and a dry white” lands as a filter.
- Taps are instant and cost nothing — the guided chips call no model at all.
- Too expensive? Another idea? One tap and the whole answer recomposes.
- A guest can leave the flow at any point and land in the normal menu.
Recommendations are a discovery aid. Guests with allergies or intolerances are told to confirm ingredients with your staff.
How the AI menu assistant works
Nothing with fish. Something savoury, and a dry white.
Noted — no fish, savoury, dry white. Full meal or just a main?
Full meal. Keep it under €35.
Buddy only ever picks from dishes that exist on your menu — never an invented one.
Why this earns more than a PDF ever did
An undecided guest is a table that turns slower and spends less. They order the cheapest thing they recognise, or they occupy a waiter for four minutes at the exact moment the room fills. Buddy answers in seconds, on every cover at the same time, and it answers with the dish you wanted to move — plus the glass beside it, which is the line on the bill nobody ever manages to upsell at eight o’clock on a Friday.
A sommelier for €19 a month
Most guests order wine by colour and price, because asking feels like an exam. Buddy reads your list once and learns it in your list’s own words — red or white, the grape, whether it is tannic, structured, dry, savoury — then pairs a glass with the plate it has just recommended.
It is held to the same rule as everything else: the wine has to exist on your list, at your price. And when the guest’s constraints leave nothing sensible, it says so — “there is no fruity white on this list that stands up to the steak” — instead of inventing a pairing to look clever. That sentence is the most credible thing the whole feature ever says.
- Wire explicit pairings by hand when you know better than any model.
- Wine bars and enotecas can flip the flow: choose the glass first, then what to eat with it.
- On Business, each recommendation opens with a short line in your house tone — the way a host would introduce it.
Tonight’s pairing
“The Chianti has the tannin to cut the fat on the tagliata. If you would rather stay lighter, the Vermentino works with the vegetables instead.”
Illustrative. Every dish, wine and price a guest sees is read from your published menu.
We pay for the AI. You get 1,500 requests a month.
1,500 on Restaurant, 4,000 on Business — and only three things spend one: a guest typing a sentence, the one-off reading of a new version of your menu, and a PDF import. Scanning the QR, browsing the carte and tapping the suggestion chips never reach a model at all, which is why a full dining room can cost nothing.
What counts as a request
A typed sentence, a menu re-read after you edit it, a PDF import. Taps, scans and page views are free, and stay free.
If you run out
Service continues. Buddy keeps recommending and pairing on its own engine; it just stops reading free text until the month turns. Your guests see no error.
If you need more
Bring your own OpenAI, Gemini or Claude key and our cap stops applying — your provider bills you at cost. Or tell us your volume and we raise it.
An AI you can put in front of guests
A recommendation engine in a dining room has to be wrong in safe ways. Suggesting a dish someone doesn’t fancy is fine. Inventing a dish, or mishandling an allergen, is not — so neither is possible here.
It cannot invent a dish
Every pick is validated against an item ID in your published menu, and the price is re-read from the menu. A convincing dish name with no matching ID is discarded rather than shown.
Allergens wait for the guest’s confirmation
A model reading an allergy out of a sentence is a suggestion, never a fact. Buddy offers the constraint; only the guest’s own tap turns it into a filter that removes dishes.
Sold out means sold out
Hide an item and it leaves the recommendations immediately, cached answers included, so nobody is sent a dish the kitchen ran out of at seven.
It speaks your menu’s language
6 languages guest-side, and the vocabulary comes from your own carte: a guest asking for something full-bodied is matched to the word your list actually uses.
Update in seconds
Change a price, hide a dish, add tonight’s special — live instantly, on the QR already glued to the table.
Print once, properly
Table-ready QR artwork in SVG and PDF, your logo in the middle, your own domain on the link.
See what the room does
Scans by day, country and device — which table tent works, and when your menu is really being opened.
One engine, every kind of house
A trattoria with five courses, an enoteca that starts from the glass, a bar with twelve lines and no descriptions — the same AI menu shapes itself to each.
Trattorias & osterias
Full-course composition with the total
Fine dining & tasting menus
Tasting path plus a wine flight
Bars, cafés & food trucks
Flat lists, drinks first, no fuss
Simple pricing
Subscriptions & pricing
The AI menu lives on Restaurant and Business. Billing is handled by PayPal, you can cancel whenever you like, and the AI allowance is part of the price rather than a separate meter.
Free
No card, no expiry date.
- Short links + static QR
- QR colour & shape styling
- UTM + click/scan analytics
- Dashboard (ad-supported)
Pro
€84 billed yearly · save €24 a year
14-day free trial
- Everything in Free
- Dynamic QR (editable) + logo & frames
- Branded link-in-bio + custom codes
- Custom domain (CNAME) with free SSL
- Full analytics · no ads
Restaurant
€180 billed yearly · save €48 a year
14-day free trial
- Everything in Pro
- AI QR menu, up to 400 dishes + PDF import
- Restaurant Buddy: names the dish, pairs the wine
- 1,500 AI requests a month included
- Your menu on your own domain · print-ready
Business
€276 billed yearly · save €72 a year
14-day free trial
- Everything in Restaurant
- Workspaces — up to 25 clients, one bill
- Bulk creation + one print-ready PDF per run
- Client reports, handover · 4,000 AI requests
- REST API + MCP access
Cancel any time from your PayPal account. Upgrades apply to every page you own that your tier covers. Running more than one venue? Talk to us.
Questions restaurateurs actually ask
- Do I need my own AI account or API key?
- No. The AI is part of the Restaurant plan at €19 a month and we pay for it: 1,500 AI requests every month, 4,000 on Business. You publish the menu and it works.
- What actually uses one of those AI requests?
- Three things: a guest typing a sentence instead of tapping a suggestion, the one-off reading of each new version of your menu, and importing a printed menu from a PDF or photos. Scanning the QR, browsing the menu and tapping the guided chips call no model at all, so most guests use none.
- Can Buddy recommend a dish that is not on my menu?
- No. Every recommendation is checked against an item ID in your published menu before it is shown, and the price the guest reads comes from your menu rather than from a model. A convincing invented dish fails that check instead of reaching the table.
- How does it handle allergies?
- Carefully, and deliberately not automatically. If a guest writes that they are allergic to milk, Buddy offers a confirmation instead of silently filtering: only once the guest taps it does the constraint apply, and from then on no dish carrying that allergen can be suggested. It stays a discovery aid, and guests are told to confirm ingredients with your staff.
- Can I turn my existing PDF menu into this?
- Yes, and it is the fastest way in. Upload the PDF, or photographs of the pages, up to 4 MB per import. Dishes, sections and prices come back as editable rows, the language is detected and a matching template is suggested. You review everything before it goes live.
- What happens if I go over the monthly AI allowance?
- Nothing visibly breaks. Buddy keeps composing recommendations with its own engine — the guided chips, the pairings, the allergen and dietary filters, the budget bands — and simply stops reading freely typed sentences until the month turns. If you need more, connect your own provider key and our cap stops applying, or ask us to raise it.
- What languages do my guests get?
- 6: English, Italian, Spanish, French, German and Portuguese. Buddy answers in the language the guest is using, with the words your own menu uses.
Tonight’s service could already have an AI on the floor
Upload the menu you print today, check what the AI read, print one QR. €19 a month, AI included, cancel whenever.