Shuck the oysters,we'll seat the bar.

Yes. Zavo connects to the diary you already run — ResDiary, OpenTable, SevenRooms, or DesignMyNight — so it seats covers against your live availability and writes every booking straight back, with nothing for your team to re-key. The diary your host already trusts stays the single source of truth, and Zavo simply answers the calls a busy raw bar can't reach. If you keep the catch on a daily specials board, we keep Zavo quoting today's landings rather than yesterday's. Tell us how you take bookings now and we'll set Zavo up around your room rather than asking a busy team to change systems mid-week, so your floor keeps running exactly as it does today.

Yes — and it's one of the biggest wins. The oyster hour fills the early evening at exactly the moment your raw bar is busiest and the phone goes unanswered. Zavo reads your live availability and seats those tables back to back, taking the date, the time, the party size, and whether they want the raw bar or a table, then confirming by text. Because it only offers a slot you can genuinely turn, the early rush fills without a clash. Reschedules update the diary live, so a freed table can be re-let. The oyster-hour bookings that used to ring out while your kitchen shucked now get answered and seated every time, which is where a lot of the return shows up.

Yes — these are the bookings Zavo is keenest to catch, because a fruits de mer for a birthday or a family gathering is high-spend and the easiest to lose to a missed call. For a big table it takes the numbers and the date, talks the caller through your platters and sharing options, and routes the enquiry to your manager with everything attached so you can confirm the detail. Should you want a deposit before a fruits de mer goes in the book, a secure link goes out to the caller mid-conversation to lock the platter in. Because the line stays open at peak and long past last shucking, the group sketching out a celebration late in the evening is caught rather than dropped. Winning more of these platter tables is, for most seafood restaurants, the quickest payback Zavo delivers.

Yes. A seafood menu changes daily, so Zavo quotes from your specials board rather than improvising. It tells callers what landed today, what the market-price fish is running at, and what's already sold out, saying only what you've configured — so nobody is promised a dish you've run out of or quoted a price you've changed. When you update the board, Zavo updates with it, so the answers stay current through the service. The everyday questions get answered too: where you are, whether you do smaller plates at the bar, and what's on the wine list. A caller weighing your restaurant against another gets an accurate, confident answer rather than a vague one that sends them elsewhere.

With real care, because shellfish is one of the most serious allergens. Zavo relays only what you've recorded against each dish — which carry crab, prawn, mussel, or oyster, and where cross-contact is a genuine risk in a kitchen that handles shellfish all day — so it tells an allergic caller plainly which dishes are safe and never guesses an ingredient. It flags the allergy against the booking so the kitchen is alerted when the guest arrives, and logs the call with a transcript, giving you a clean record for your food-safety duties. A question only the kitchen can settle is passed to you rather than answered. The agent works strictly within the rules you set, which matters more here than almost anywhere.

A full diary is something Zavo works with rather than a wall it slams in a guest's face. With the slot they asked for gone, it reaches for the nearest fit — an earlier or later table, another evening, or a stool at the raw bar if you seat walk-ins for shellfish there — so a keen group sticks with you instead of dialling the oyster place along the front. Keep a waiting list and it can log the caller, their party size, and how to reach them, then ring back the moment a table opens. The rules are yours: how tightly the oyster hour runs, whether to leave room for the odd no-show, and what gets offered once you're full. The goal is a packed Saturday that channels demand into future covers rather than letting a flat no waste it.

Yes — and which enquiries land on a person's desk is entirely your call. Zavo picks out the ones that need a human hand — a private-room booking, a raw-bar takeover, a large fruits de mer feast — and hands them to whoever you've named, complete with a short note on what the caller wanted. An ordinary table just goes in the diary, so nobody gets dragged off the raw bar to take a reservation a host could handle in seconds. The thresholds belong to you: the party size that rings a person directly, the ones that wait for a callback, and who owns each kind of event. A big private booking no longer languishes in voicemail until after the catch is cleared — your named contact is pinged at once and can ring back while the group is still weighing where to hold their feast.

Yes. Every call is encrypted both in transit and at rest, access is permission-based and logged to the person, and the host repeats back only what you've set it to share. Guest names, numbers, and the detail behind a platter booking are held to enterprise standards — never resold, never fed to a third-party model for training. Where a deposit secures a big fruits de mer table, it travels down a secure payment link, so card numbers never ride along on a busy call or linger at the host stand by the raw bar. A complete audit trail follows each call, which makes your data-protection duties and a look back at how any booking was taken refreshingly simple. Run a set policy on how long booking or deposit records live? We'll dial Zavo's retention to match it before you take your first catch of calls.

Always — and that's precisely where most of the value hides. The line stays live around the clock, through the Friday and Saturday rush and into the late evenings when guests settle in to plan a weekend fruits de mer. The oyster-hour tables and platter enquiries that once tipped into voicemail are now answered, seated, and confirmed, so you never open the week trailing a rival who simply happened to pick up. No rota to juggle, no slump in service late on a Saturday — the caller at 9pm hears the same warm welcome as the one at noon while your team keeps shucking. For a seafood restaurant that lets the phone ring out behind a busy raw bar today, that single fact tends to shift how many covers land across a month.

Yes. If you run a group or a second restaurant, Zavo can answer for each site with its own diary, menu, specials board, and routing, while giving you a single view of every call across the group. A caller reaches a host who knows that site's availability and what landed today, not a generic line. You can set different opening hours, different managers to escalate to, and different handling per site, so a coastal restaurant and a city one run completely differently under one system. Reporting gathers it all up the chain, so you can hold covers booked and calls answered against each raw bar side by side. Single independent or a small group, every caller meets the same steady welcome and their booking drops into the right restaurant's diary rather than a shared muddle.

It pulls on two threads that tighten each other. First, the dropped calls dry up: the oyster-hour tables, the platter celebrations, and the catch questions that used to ring out behind a busy raw bar are now answered and booked, so more of the demand already on your line converts. Second, deposits and reminders mean the bookings you do take actually walk through the door, so a full diary holds firm instead of bleeding away to no-shows. Most seafood restaurants watch covers and held platter tables climb inside the first few weeks, purely because nothing slips through any more. We'd sooner let your own till settle the question, so Zavo logs every call, booking, and deposit across a month — the covers it wins sit right next to what you pay, judged on your figures rather than ours.

No. Zavo books only against your live availability, so it can't seat a table you don't have or double-book the oyster hour, and it says nothing you haven't configured it to say. It works from your menu, your specials board, your platters, and your rules, so it won't invent a dish, promise a table you're holding, or quote a market price you've changed. Anything it hasn't been told is recorded and routed to you rather than guessed — which matters most around shellfish allergies and sold-out specials. You can replay any call, read back exactly what was said, and sharpen its answers each time the catch changes on the board. Everyday bookings and questions are settled quickly and correctly at the raw bar, while anything that calls for genuine judgement is still handed to a person.

Yes. The instant a table goes in the book, a text confirmation goes out, with a reminder ahead of the day, so a group that booked a fortnight back actually shows up for the catch. On the larger platter tables it secures a deposit by secure link, so a fruits de mer for twenty can't quietly evaporate and leave your best section bare on a Saturday. Should a guest need to cancel, the diary refreshes the moment they say so and the table can be re-let instead of written off. Once a celebration wraps, it can circle back to tempt the group in again, turning a one-off feast into a booking that returns. All of it runs on its own, so your diary holds tighter and your floor stays at the raw bar shucking rather than ringing round to confirm.

Most seafood restaurants are live within a few days, and there's nothing to buy or install. You redirect your existing number to Zavo, connect your booking system, and brief it on your menu, your platters, your specials board, and how you like the big tables handled. From the first call it answers in your restaurant's voice, clear and warm whatever the raw bar is doing, and you can listen back to conversations and refine its answers as the catch changes. Wiring it into your diary is on us. For most owners the one standing job is keeping the specials board and the wine list current with the day's catch — and that habit, much like a well-run raw bar, only leaves the whole front of house running sharper.

That's fine — plenty of seafood restaurants still do. Out of the box Zavo speaks to the main booking platforms, yet it stays married to none of them. Run the night from a paper book beside the raw bar and it can still take every booking, set it down as a clean, structured record, and pass it to you whatever way suits your floor — synced where the wiring allows, or pushed to a shared screen your team scans before each service — so not a single catch goes astray and the floor stays yours. Where an older setup won't stretch to a full integration, we shape the closest workable link while we onboard you. You're never made to rework how your restaurant runs just to stop losing the platter bookings that fill your tables.