Playbook, restaurant
Why last orders matters more than the opening time
This looks like the most boring question in hospitality and it is the one that produces the most wasted journeys. A restaurant has at least four clocks running: when the doors open, when the kitchen starts, when food stops, and when the bar stops. Publishing one number for all four is how a table of six arrives at nine fifteen to be told the kitchen closed at nine.
Why this is not the general answer
The handling pattern for opening hours holds across every trade. What follows is the part that does not.
- In most trades opening hours are a single pair of times, while a restaurant has a service pattern with a gap in the middle of it and a kitchen that closes before the room does.
- The variations carry the traffic: a Sunday that runs to five, a Monday closure, a bank holiday, a private hire that shuts the room, a kitchen that stops early on a quiet Tuesday.
- Nobody asks are you open, they ask can we still get food at half nine, which is a different question and needs the last orders time rather than the closing time.
- This is the pair in the file where indexing the live page rather than an uploaded copy matters most, because a stale hours document is confidently wrong rather than absent.
How it arrives
- what time do you stop serving food
- are you open on monday
- can we still eat if we get there at 9
- do you do food all day on sunday
- what time is last orders at the bar
- are you open on bank holiday monday
What has to be indexed for this to work
| A kitchen service table, not an opening hours table | Per day: doors open, kitchen from, kitchen until, bar until. Four columns rather than two. Write the afternoon gap explicitly if you have one, because a guest reading twelve until eleven will assume food at four and will not forgive being wrong about it. |
|---|---|
| The dates that break the pattern, kept current | Public holidays, the week you close in January, the day the room is out for a private event, the earlier finish on Christmas Eve. These are asked far more often than the ordinary week and they are the ones nobody remembers to publish. |
| What is available between services | If the bar stays open with a snack menu, or coffee only, say so. This turns a refusal into a booking, and it is the answer to the most common version of the question, which is really can we come now. |
The reply
The kitchen serves until nine thirty from Tuesday to Thursday and until ten on Friday and Saturday, so a nine fifteen arrival is fine on any of those nights. The bar stays open an hour after the kitchen closes. We are closed all day Monday, and Sunday is lunch service only with last orders at four.
It answers the real question, which is whether they can still eat, before it answers the one that was typed. It gives the bar separately so nobody assumes the room shuts with the kitchen, and it volunteers the Monday closure and the shorter Sunday because those are the two facts most likely to send somebody to a locked door.
Where it stops
The trigger. A question about a specific date the indexed material does not cover, or any hours question that turns into a table request, such as are you open Saturday and can you fit us in at eight.
I do not have anything published for that date, so I would rather not guess. Please call the restaurant to check, or leave your name, email and a message and we will confirm. I can tell you the usual service times for any day of the week.
It stops answering before it guesses, says who will pick it up, and asks for the one thing that makes a reply possible. Nothing about it reads as a dead end.
Never say this here
Out of bounds
- A closing time in answer to a question about food, because the room and the kitchen close at different times.
- That the restaurant is open on a public holiday unless that specific date is in the indexed material.
- That a table is free at a time, when the question was only about whether the kitchen is serving.
- That hours are the same across sites, when a group publishes a separate pattern per venue.
Questions
- Should we upload our hours or point at the page?
- Point at the page you already keep current, and index it as part of a crawl of your own site. Hours are the fact most likely to change and least likely to be re-uploaded, and an assistant quoting an eight month old file with a citation attached looks more authoritative than the truth.
- How does it handle a holiday we forgot to publish?
- Below the match threshold you set, the question never reaches the model and the guest gets your fallback wording instead. That is the correct outcome for an unpublished date: a short honest miss with your phone number in it beats a plausible guess.
- Can it tell somebody how busy we are tonight?
- No. It has no view of the table plan or the diary, only the documents you index. It can say when the kitchen serves and point at the booking link, which is what the guest needs in order to act.
Keep reading
- Everything for a restaurantHours, last orders, deposits and dietary options are safe ground. Confirming a dish is free of an allergen never is.
- Handling opening hours in generalHolidays, seasonal variation, last orders and multiple sites. Keeping one source of truth so the assistant and your map listing agree.
- Set menus, minimum spends and the table of twelveParty thresholds, set menus, minimum spends and pre-order deadlines answer well. The date itself needs whoever holds the diary.
- The per head charge nobody read before they bookedA card held against a table and a charge per empty seat only hold up if the guest was told first. That telling is the work.
- The handover a restaurant cannot do by emailA callback form suits a private hire enquiry. For an allergy before tonight's service it does not, and the wording must lead with the phone.
Try it on your own material
Upload a document or point it at your site, paste one line of HTML, then ask it something only your business could answer.