Setting up Yesoma for a restaurant

Yesoma helps restaurants manage the inquiries that live outside your POS — private dining requests, large-group reservations, catering orders, gift card sales, and service complaints that arrive by phone, email, DM, or WhatsApp. It is not a reservation system or a table-management tool; your existing booking platform handles day-to-day covers. Yesoma handles the high-value, high-effort inquiries that need a real conversation before anything is confirmed.

1. What Yesoma manages for a restaurant — and what it does not

The restaurant playbook covers eight inquiry types:

• Large-group reservations (8–20 guests) with pre-arranged menu options and deposit handling
• Private dining room bookings with food-and-beverage minimums
• Full-restaurant buyouts (exclusive whole-venue events)
• In-house catering — pickup (call-ahead orders for offices and family events)
• In-house catering — delivery + setup (your menu, brought to the client)
• Gift card and certificate purchases, including corporate bulk orders
• Customer experience complaints and service recovery (manager response flow)
• Special-occasion arrangements (anniversary, proposal, birthday — cake, champagne, decor coordination)

Yesoma does not see or manage:

• Walk-in seating or table assignments
• Online reservation widgets (OpenTable, Resy, your own booking link)
• Point-of-sale transactions
• Nightly covers, wait lists, or floor plans

If a guest sends you a message asking to reserve a table for two tonight, that is a reservation handled by your existing system. If a corporate client messages asking about booking the private dining room for a team dinner of 30, that is a Yesoma inquiry.

2. Applying the restaurant playbook during onboarding

When you select Restaurant on the industry picker during onboarding, Yesoma pre-loads your workspace with the services, policies, FAQs, and reply templates described in this article. You do not need to write anything from scratch — the playbook gives you a working baseline in under five minutes.

After the playbook is applied, walk through three quick edits before you start taking inquiries:

Services — open each service and fill in any bracketed placeholders:

• Private dining room capacity ([X] guests) and your actual F&B minimum
• Delivery radius or service area for catering
• Corkage fee and cake-cutting fee amounts

Business Brain — add your actual cuisine style, neighborhood, hours, and any signature offerings. The Business Brain is what Yesoma's AI draws on when it drafts reply suggestions, so the more specific you are, the better those suggestions fit your voice.

Reply templates — scan the eight pre-loaded templates. The complaint-acknowledgment and complaint-resolution templates in particular are worth reading carefully and adjusting to match how your management team actually speaks.

Nothing is locked — you can add, remove, or rename any service or template at any time from Settings.

3. Large-group and private event workflow

Large-group and private event inquiries follow the same basic flow:

1. Inquiry arrives — via your website contact form, a WhatsApp message, an email, or your Yesoma public page. It lands in your inbox tagged with the source.
2. First reply — the pre-loaded "First reply — private event inquiry" template sends (or is suggested for your approval) within the same business day. It asks for the five things you need before you can confirm: date, guest count, occasion, dietary restrictions, and budget.
3. Quote or confirmation — once you have those details, you send pricing, availability, and the deposit link. For groups 12+, the deposit holds the reservation. For private dining, the deposit covers the F&B minimum. For buyouts, it is 50% of the custom quote.
4. Follow-up — if three days pass after you send a quote and the client has not responded, Yesoma prompts a follow-up.
5. Event complete — one day after the event, Yesoma sends a review request. This fires only for Yesoma-managed inquiries (private events, catering, special-occasion arrangements) — not for anonymous walk-in dining.

The deposit and auto-gratuity policies are pre-loaded as text in the booking confirmation template. Adjust the percentages and amounts to match your actual house policy before you use them.

4. Catering inquiry handling

The restaurant playbook treats in-house catering as two distinct services: pickup and delivery. They are priced separately (pickup minimum $200, delivery minimum $400 plus a delivery fee) and have different information requirements — delivery requires a confirmed address, a setup preference, and a decision on whether service staff are needed.

When a catering inquiry arrives:

• The "First reply — catering inquiry" template asks: pickup or delivery, date and time, guest count, dietary needs, and cuisine preference.
• Once you know the order details, you confirm the menu, send the per-head or flat-rate pricing, and collect the 50% deposit to confirm the order.
• A deposit reminder is built into the follow-up cadence if the deposit has not cleared within three days of the quote.

The key difference between the restaurant catering service and a standalone catering company: your menu is the same menu you serve in-restaurant. There is no per-head tasting or custom menu build from scratch. This is an advantage — the client already knows what they are getting — and your reply templates should reflect that confidence.

If you also run a separate, full-service catering operation (with its own kitchen, staff, and custom-menu proposals), consider whether the standalone Catering playbook is a better fit for that business, with the Restaurant playbook used only for your in-house extension service.

5. Service-recovery template patterns

Restaurants live and die on how they handle bad experiences. A guest who feels genuinely heard after a poor visit is far more likely to return — and far less likely to leave a one-star review — than one who receives a defensive or generic response.

The pre-loaded service recovery templates are built around three principles:

Acknowledge before you explain. The complaint acknowledgment template does not include any explanation of what went wrong. It confirms receipt, says you are sorry, and promises a follow-up within 24 hours. This alone separates you from most restaurant complaint responses. No "we were very busy that night" — just a sincere acknowledgment.

Investigate before you resolve. The resolution template has a placeholder — "[honest account of what happened]" — that you fill in after you have actually talked to the team. The offer to make it right (comp, credit, refund, manager call) comes after the acknowledgment, not instead of it.

Give the manager real discretion. The template includes multiple resolution options: a credit toward a return visit, a comped meal, a partial refund of a specific item, or a call with a manager. Whoever is handling the inbox needs the authority to choose which option fits. If they have to escalate every complaint before they can respond, the 24-hour promise becomes hollow. Set a comp / credit limit that the inbox manager can use without escalation.

Both templates use {{customer_first_name}} so the message feels personal, and the response is always signed with the business name rather than a generic "the team." These are not form letters — they are tools that a manager uses to have a real conversation.

6. Gift card bulk inquiries

Individual gift card purchases are simple: denomination, physical or digital, shipping or email address. The confirmation template handles it.

The more valuable use case is corporate bulk orders — 10 or more cards for employee recognition, client gifting, or a holiday program. When a bulk inquiry arrives, the template prompts you to ask: quantity, denomination, physical vs. digital, personalization needs, and delivery deadline.

A few things to set up before your first bulk order:

• Decide whether you offer a discount at a certain quantity threshold (e.g., 10% off orders of 20+ cards) and note it in the Gift Cards service description.
• Decide whether you accept a company name or custom message on the card, and what the lead time is for physical cards with custom printing.
• Confirm how payment works for bulk — whether you invoice, require full payment upfront, or offer net-30 for established corporate clients.

The gift card service has no deposit requirement by default (full payment processes the order). If you add personalization or custom printing as a service, you may want to require a 50% deposit to cover the print run.

7. What your reply templates look like in action

Every template in the restaurant playbook uses two placeholder formats:

• {{customer_first_name}} — filled automatically by Yesoma from the customer's record
• [bracket placeholders] — filled by you before sending (e.g., [date], [guest_count], [occasion], [address], [deposit amount])

For example, the large-group confirmation template looks like this in draft:

Hi {{customer_first_name}}, your large-group reservation is confirmed.
Date: [date] — Arrival time: [time] — Guest count: [guest_count]

When you open the draft in your inbox, {{customer_first_name}} is already replaced with the guest's name. You fill in the brackets, review the auto-gratuity note, and send.

The private event first-reply template is the most important one to use consistently — it collects the five pieces of information (date, guest count, occasion, dietary restrictions, budget) that you need before you can send any kind of quote. Sending that template within the same business day, every time, is the behavior that turns Yesoma into a reliable front-of-house extension.

Common questions

Does Yesoma connect to OpenTable or Resy? Not directly. Yesoma manages inquiry conversations, not real-time table availability. You confirm availability manually and update the inquiry status when the reservation is locked.

What if a large-group inquiry comes in through our reservation widget instead of Yesoma? Either forward it into Yesoma manually, or ask the guest to send a message through your Yesoma contact page so the conversation is tracked. Large-group inquiries that require a deposit and menu coordination are worth managing in Yesoma regardless of how they arrive.

Can I use the complaint templates for social media complaints? Yes — if a guest sends a complaint via WhatsApp or email, the templates work directly. For public social media complaints, use the templates as a starting point for your response but adapt the tone for the public context. Yesoma manages direct-message conversations, not public posts.

When does the review request fire? One day after a Yesoma-managed inquiry is marked complete — a private event, buyout, catering order, or special-occasion arrangement. It does not fire automatically after walk-in dining visits because Yesoma does not know about those. If you want to solicit walk-in reviews, you can trigger a review request manually from the customer record.