ChatGPT for restaurants: prompts that save owners time

ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini are good at first drafts: menu descriptions, job posts, review replies, training checklists and catering emails. They only know your recipes, prices and local rules if you paste them in, and they can sound sure while being wrong. Give the assistant your facts, let it draft, and have a person check anything a guest or employee will rely on.

OpenAI's own help center says ChatGPT can produce incorrect or misleading outputs and may sound confident when it is wrong, and it tells users to treat it as a first draft. The prompts below follow that advice. Each one hands the assistant the facts and keeps the final call with you.

Which restaurant jobs can a general AI assistant draft?

Job	What to give the assistant	What a person checks before use
Menu descriptions	Each dish's real ingredients, cooking method and price	Every ingredient named, every allergen and every price
Job posts	Role, pay range, shifts, duties and how to apply	Pay, schedule and any wording that favors or discourages a group of applicants
Review replies	The review text and what actually happened	Facts, tone and any promise of a refund or free meal
Opening, closing and training checklists	Your current steps, written roughly, and your equipment list	Temperatures, cleaning steps and times against your health code and manuals
Allergen matrix, first draft	Recipes and supplier ingredient labels	Every row, by the person who owns food safety
Catering and event emails	Your catering menu, prices, minimums and lead times	Date, headcount, quote and deposit terms

What prompts work for menu descriptions and job posts?

Give facts, a word limit and a tone. Ask the assistant to invent nothing. The prompts below are examples to adapt; replace the bracketed parts with your own details.

Example prompt: Write menu descriptions of 20 words or fewer for the dishes below. Use only the ingredients I list. Do not add health claims or words like "famous." Keep the tone plain and warm. [Dish name, ingredients, cooking method, price for each dish.]

Example prompt: Write a job post for a line cook at a 60-seat neighborhood restaurant. Pay is [range] per hour, shifts are [days and hours], duties are [list]. Include how to apply. Keep it under 200 words. Describe the job and its requirements only, with no wording about age, gender or background.

The second prompt matters for a legal reason. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission says it is illegal to publish a job ad that shows a preference based on age (40 or older), sex, race and other protected traits. Its examples include ads seeking "females" or "recent college graduates." Read every AI-drafted ad for words like "young" or "energetic" before you post it.

How should you use it for review replies?

Paste the review, add what your team found, and ask for two short options. Pick one, edit it and post it yourself.

Example prompt: Draft two replies of under 80 words to this Google review. Thank the guest, name the problem they raised, and say what we changed: [what you changed]. Do not offer a refund or discount. Do not argue with the guest. [Paste the review.]

Google's help page on replying to reviews says replies are checked against its content policies, posted publicly under the review, and the reviewer is notified. Whatever you post stays public, so read it as a stranger would.

Can it write standard operating procedures?

Yes, if you give it your steps. Type or dictate how your best closer shuts down the line, then ask the assistant to turn it into a numbered checklist with a sign-off line. Ask it to flag any step where a temperature, time or chemical ratio is missing, and fill those in from your equipment manuals and health department rules yourself.

Example prompt: Turn these notes into a closing checklist for the fry station, numbered in order, with a box to tick for each step and a line for the manager's initials. Mark any step where my notes leave out a time, temperature or product name. Do not fill those in. [Paste notes.]

How should allergen checks work?

An assistant can sort ingredients into a table faster than you can. It cannot know what is in a supplier's sauce base unless you give it the label, and it cannot see cross-contact in your kitchen.

The FDA lists nine major food allergens: milk, eggs, fish, crustacean shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat, soybeans and sesame. Use them as columns.

1. Paste each recipe and the ingredient list from each supplier label.
2. Ask for a table with one row per dish and a column for each of the nine allergens, marking only what appears in the text you gave.
3. Ask it to list any ingredient it could not classify, such as "spice blend" or "house sauce."
4. Have the person responsible for food safety check every row against the labels and the kitchen's prep, fryer and grill sharing.
5. Date the sheet and redo it whenever a recipe or supplier changes.

Keep guest allergen questions with trained staff. The restaurant chatbot guide covers which guest questions to route to a person.

What should you keep away from a chatbot?

• Legal and wage answers. In March 2024 The Markup found New York City's official business chatbot telling owners a restaurant could go cash-free and that bosses could take workers' tips. Both answers were wrong. Check tip, overtime, cash and scheduling rules with the agency or an adviser.
• Card numbers and guest records. Paste no payment details, guest phone lists or staff Social Security numbers.
• Final allergen answers to guests. Use the checked sheet, and a person.
• Hiring and firing decisions. Keep these with a manager who has met the people involved.
• Posting without reading. Review replies and social posts go out under your name.

What happens to what you type?

Each assistant has a setting for whether your chats help train its models. Check it before you paste anything about staff, guests or finances.

Assistant	What the company says	Where to change it
ChatGPT	OpenAI may use conversations to train its models on plans for individuals; temporary chats are not used while they stay temporary	Settings, then Data controls, then turn off "Improve the model for everyone"
Claude	Anthropic uses Free, Pro and Max chats for training if you allow it; incognito chats are not used	Settings, then Privacy, then the "Help improve" toggle
Gemini	Google says human reviewers read some chats and asks users not to enter confidential information	Turn off Keep Activity, or use temporary chats

OpenAI says it does not use inputs from ChatGPT Business and Enterprise to train its models by default. If several managers use an assistant for work, ask about a business plan.

Where does a general assistant stop being enough?

A chat assistant drafts text when you ask for it. Answering the phone during the dinner rush and writing orders into your POS take a different kind of tool. Maple's Voice plan answers calls, hours questions and FAQs and transfers calls to staff for $150/month billed monthly or $85/month billed yearly. Pro adds phone orders into supported POS systems and reservations for $350/month billed monthly or $220/month billed yearly. The phone ordering page sets out a trial from call to kitchen.

For the wider picture of where restaurants use AI, from drive-thrus to scheduling, see the task-by-task guide to restaurant AI.

Published by Maple. This AI-assisted guide combines OpenAI, Anthropic and Google help pages, FDA, EEOC and Google Business Profile guidance, and reporting from The Markup with original example prompts. The prompts are untested examples. Maple sells restaurant phone AI and does not sell a general AI assistant.