Is your favorite restaurant using AI?
Artificial intelligence and restaurants don’t seem to belong in the same sentence. If you picture AI in your favorite fast-casual spot, you might imagine something conspicuous and a little unsettling: a mechanical arm flipping burgers, a tablet replacing a server or a robot shaking up drinks behind the bar.
That vision exists. But it’s not what’s happening in most restaurants.
Across the country, AI has quietly become a part of restaurant teams. It does heavy lifting in administrative areas like inventory spreadsheets, reservation logs, and late-night prep lists made after the dining room empties and the chairs are stacked upside down on tables.
It’s doing what chef Arnaldo Castillo, the owner and executive chef of Tio Lucho’s in Poncey-Highland, calls “the back-end stuff.”
Castillo, a James Beard Award semifinalist for Best Chef Southeast in 2024, said, “We have Toast (a restaurant-specific software) as our point-of-service system, and Toast has an AI feature. So, instead of manually searching through orders to count how many ceviches I sold on Feb. 14, clicking multiple tabs and writing down information to figure out my margins, I can now use AI to get the answers in a couple of seconds. It allows you to forecast a bit better.”
🍽️ Learn how chefs use AI to catch up and sharpen restaurant forecasting
