Prompts for restaurant owners: menu, customer reviews, and social media

At 3 p.m., between the end of service and the evening prep, you have twenty minutes to respond to the review of a customer who waited forty minutes for their dish. You can write in the heat of the moment, with the irritation of the rush, or not reply at all. A well-built prompt gives you a calm draft that you touch up in two minutes.

Menu, chalkboards, review replies, posts: these are short texts, for which the AI is useful as long as you give it your kitchen, not kitchens in general.

Describe a dish with its facts

Without instructions, the AI describes every dish as "made with passion" and "with authentic flavors." Your customers learn nothing from that. Give it what is true on the plate.

Write the descriptions of three dishes for the menu of [NAME], [TYPE OF RESTAURANT] in [CITY].

For each dish, I give you: the name, the main ingredients with their origin when I know it, the cooking method, what comes with it.

1. [DISH 1: INGREDIENTS, ORIGIN, COOKING, SIDE]
2. [DISH 2]
3. [DISH 3]

Each description is 20 words maximum, with no filler adjectives ("tasty," "delicious," "authentic"). Describe what the customer will see and eat. Add no ingredient or origin that isn't in my list.

One point where the AI must not decide: allergens. Informing customers about allergens is a regulatory requirement, and the list must come from your technical sheets, not from a generated description. If you put a dish in the prompt, add its allergens as data, and check that the description leaves none out.

Reply to a negative review without justifying yourself

A public reply is aimed as much at future customers as at the author of the review. Readers are mostly looking for an owner who listens and acts.

Write a public reply to this Google review, 70 words maximum, polite and direct tone, no stock phrases.

Review: "[PASTE THE REVIEW]"
What I checked internally: [E.G., THAT DAY, A COOK WAS ABSENT AND THE DINING ROOM WAS FULL]
What I acknowledge: [THE PART OF THE REVIEW THAT IS FAIR]
What I changed or what I offer: [CONCRETE ACTION OR AN INVITATION TO CONTACT ME BY PHONE]

Start by thanking them in a specific way (not "thank you for your feedback"). Don't dispute the customer's experience, don't blame anyone, and don't cite any reason I haven't given you. Sign [FIRST NAME], [ROLE].

If the review seems false or defamatory to you, the platform has a reporting procedure. To find out what sixty reviews are saying, sorting by examples works well: give three reviews already sorted and paste in the rest.

A post to fill the dining room at lunch

A message that brings in specific customers on a specific day is worth more than a message about "our passion for cooking."

Write an Instagram post of 60 words maximum for [NAME], [TYPE OF CUISINE] in [CITY].

Goal: fill the dining room Tuesday and Wednesday at lunch.
Offer: [SPECIAL, PRICE, HOURS].
Dish of the moment: [DISH AND ITS REAL DISTINCTIVE FEATURE, E.G., FISH THAT ARRIVED THIS MORNING FROM [PORT]].
Audience: local office workers, one-hour break.

Tone: that of an owner speaking to his regulars. One idea, one practical piece of information, how to book. No emojis at the start of sentences, no superlatives.

Reread the numbers and the hours, where a mistake costs the most. To plan several posts, look at the marketing prompts for social media.

Don't put a customer's name with their reservation, number, or allergy into a chatbot: to reply to a review, the public text is enough. And when the AI hands you a generic bistro-menu phrase, a fact was missing from your prompt.

To get started, take the dish that sells worst on your menu and rewrite its description with the first prompt, filling in the origin of the ingredients. Compare sales over a few weeks, without drawing hasty conclusions.