Restaurant Event Management
A tasting, a supper club, a quiz night, a launch. Plan the evening, invite the guests it is actually for, take their answers by email, and run the door from a phone — with the seats held on your real floor plan rather than in somebody's head.
Why it matters
An evening like this is usually run on three things that do not know about each other: a poster, a spreadsheet, and the reservation book. The poster brings people who are not in the spreadsheet. The spreadsheet holds people the reservation book has never heard of. And on the night somebody works the door off a printout that stopped being true at four o'clock.
The cost is not the admin. It is that eighteen seats get sold twice, or once, and nobody finds out which until the room is full or empty.
Here the event is a thing the restaurant already understands. It takes real tables out of normal booking, it fills with real guests, and the same floor plan that runs a Tuesday runs the tasting.
Two kinds of evening, and they work differently
Most event tools pretend every event is the same shape. These are the two that actually happen in a restaurant, and the difference decides what capacity even means.
Seated at your tables
The evening runs on the floor as it stands. You choose the tables it takes over, and capacity is simply their seats added up — no number to guess. Everyone who says yes is put on a table and gets a real reservation, so the floor plan, the reservations screen and the staff portal all know they are coming. Nothing is double-booked, because the tables are genuinely taken.
The room rearranged
Tables pushed together, cleared away, or the whole room run standing. There is no meaningful table to put anybody on, so capacity is a number you set and the guest list is the door list. The floor still comes out of normal booking for the night — the room cannot be sold twice just because the furniture moved.
Inviting the guests it is for
This is where an evening is won or lost, and where sending to everybody is the tempting mistake. A hundred emails to a list that has never been sorted fills a room with people who came for the discount; twenty to the guests who actually drink wine fills it with people who will come back.
So the audience arrives already sorted, with real history attached rather than a name and an address.
Sorted by what they have actually done here
New, occasional, regular, and the ones who used to come and stopped. Each with the orders behind the label, so "regular" is a fact rather than a feeling.
Only guests who agreed to hear from you
Being recognised at your venue and agreeing to be invited are two separate things, and the second one is the one that lets you send. Nobody is emailed because they once ate here.
Never more than twice a month
A hard limit across everything the venue sends — invitations, offers, birthdays. A guest cannot be reached a third time in a month by choosing a different feature, and the audience screen shows you who is already at the limit before you send.
Staff are not customers
Somebody who works here and also eats here is excluded automatically. The employment relationship is the one that decides, and it says no.
One tap to answer
The invitation opens a page with the evening on it — the date, what it costs, what it is. The guest picks how many seats and answers there, without an account, a password or an app.
Filling the room, and the night itself
A waitlist that keeps its order
When the evening fills, the next answer joins a queue with a position. If two seats open and the party at the front needs four, the party behind them takes the seats — and the queue behind that does not silently reshuffle.
Somebody who phoned counts too
Not everyone arrives through an email. A name taken over the phone, or off the poster in the window, goes on the same list and holds the same seats.
What the kitchen needs to know travels with them
An allergy, a wheelchair, a birthday at the table. It is attached to the guest for the night and read by the kitchen and the floor — not filed with the marketing.
The door runs off a phone
Each answer carries a code. Whoever is working the door marks people in as they arrive, so at any moment the question everybody is asking — who is still to come — has an answer on the screen instead of a guess.
A price per head, or a set menu
Charge per person for the evening, and attach one of your set menus if the food is fixed. The menu is the one you already price, so a tasting does not need its own accounting.
Draft until you mean it
An evening stays a draft while you are still deciding. Publishing is what makes the link live and lets invitations go out — and cancelling tells everyone who said yes, with the reason, rather than leaving them to arrive.
Common questions
Do guests need an account to answer?
No. The link in the invitation opens the evening's page and they answer there — no sign-in, no app, no ticketing site in the middle.
Can we sell tickets?
You can set a price per head and it is shown on the invitation, so guests know what the evening costs before they commit. Payment is taken the way your venue takes it; bring that to the demo and we will talk it through.
What stops us emailing the same people every week?
A cap of two contacts per guest per month, counted across invitations, offers and birthday campaigns together. It is not a setting to turn off.
Does an event block the tables from normal bookings?
Yes. Whether the evening sits on real tables or takes the room, the floor comes out of ordinary booking for that window.
What happens when we cancel?
Everyone who said yes is told, with whatever reason you give. The seats go back and the evening stays on the record as cancelled rather than disappearing.
Can somebody bring guests?
Yes, up to a maximum party size you set per evening. Their seats are counted against capacity when they answer, not when they arrive.
How is this different from group bookings?
A group booking is one party you are quoting — a wedding lunch, a corporate dinner. An event is one evening you are filling from many parties. Different pipelines, on the same floor.