Plate the food,not the phone.

Yes. Zavo connects to the diary plant-based restaurants actually use — ResDiary, OpenTable, SevenRooms, or DesignMyNight — and seats from your live availability, so it only ever offers covers you genuinely have free. Every reservation, reschedule, and cancellation writes back in real time, so the diary on your screen always matches the room and you never sit two parties at one table. If you keep an allergen matrix or a diary of your own, that's fine too: Zavo captures each booking in a clean, structured form and sends it straight to your inbox or a shared sheet. Tell us how you take bookings now and we'll set it up around the way your kitchen already works.

That's its main job. When someone rings to book, Zavo takes the date, time, and number in the party, checks your live diary, and confirms a table on the spot — across weekend brunch, the weekday lunch, or the evening service. It can hold your larger tables for groups, note a high chair or a wheelchair space, and respect the turn times each sitting needs so the kitchen is never overwhelmed. The booking lands instantly and the guest gets a confirmation by text, so nothing rests on a scrap of paper surviving a busy shift. The result is a fuller room with far less effort, because the calls that used to ring out mid-service now turn straight into covers.

Yes, and accurately — this is where it earns its keep for a plant-based kitchen. Trained on the menu you sign off, it confirms which dishes are fully vegan rather than vegetarian, what can be made gluten-free, nut-free, or soy-free, where cross-contact is a genuine risk, and which wines, beers, and desserts are certified plant-based. It never freelances an answer it hasn't been given, so a diner with a serious allergy gets the truth, not a guess. Anything that needs a chef's judgement is passed to you with the caller's details. Your team stops reciting ingredients down the phone all day, and diners book knowing the kitchen can genuinely meet their needs.

Yes, and these are the calls worth catching. When someone enquires about a vegan wedding breakfast, a corporate launch, a supper club, or a private dinner, Zavo takes the whole brief — date, numbers, dietary needs, the style of service, and budget — and logs it as a proper lead rather than a missed call. It can answer the obvious questions about minimum spend and what's included, then route the enquiry straight to whoever runs events so you can quote and confirm. Because it answers around the clock, the catering request that comes in late at night is captured rather than lost. For most plant-based restaurants, this is where the money it saves is most obvious.

That's exactly when it earns its place. Every January, interest in plant-based eating spikes and a small restaurant's call volume can double overnight — and a single phone behind a busy pass simply can't keep up, so your busiest month becomes your most missed. Zavo answers every one of those calls at once, with no queue and no hold music, so a caller wanting a table or asking about your Veganuary menu gets booked in rather than giving up. It works through the late nights and your closed days too, capturing the enquiries that land long after service. There's no extra cover to roster and no temp to train. The busier January gets, the more calls a single line would have dropped — and the more Zavo quietly saves.

Yes — you decide what's worth interrupting service for. It picks out the calls that count — a large catering enquiry, a supplier with a delivery problem, a journalist or a regular asking for the owner — and puts them through to whoever you've chosen, with a quick note on what was said. Everything else is handled or logged for later, so you're not pulled off the floor for a question about opening hours. You set the rules: which calls ring through immediately, which wait for a callback, and who covers what. So a hot private-hire enquiry no longer waits in a voicemail box until the morning — whoever you've nominated hears about it in seconds and can ring back while the booking is still warm.

Yes, because it only ever repeats what you've configured. You give Zavo your signed-off menu and free-from policy, and it stays strictly inside it — it won't claim a dish is gluten-free if you haven't told it so, or play down a cross-contact risk to win a booking. If a caller asks something outside what it knows, it takes their details and passes the question to you rather than guessing. Every call is logged with a transcript, giving you a clean record of exactly what was said to whom, which supports your own food-information and allergen duties. The agent is there to relay your kitchen's position faithfully, not to make calls that are the chef's to make.

Security is built in, not bolted on. Calls are encrypted on the way in and held safe at rest, with access locked down and logged, and the host only shares what you've set it to share. Guest names, numbers, and booking details are handled to enterprise standards, never sold on and never used to train anyone else's models. Where a deposit is involved for a private hire, payment is taken through a secure link rather than card details being read aloud, so nothing sensitive passes over the call. Every conversation is logged in full, which helps you meet your own data-protection duties and shows clearly how any enquiry was dealt with. If you've specific requirements around how long booking data is kept, we'll walk you through Zavo's retention approach before you switch it on.

Always — and a lot of the value sits there. Zavo answers around the clock, including the evenings, the small hours, and the days your kitchen is dark, which is exactly when many diners finally sit down to plan where to eat or to book a celebration. The enquiries that used to hit voicemail outside service are answered, the allergen questions are handled, and the tables are booked in, so you don't start the week behind a place that happened to pick up on your day off. There's no rota to manage and no out-of-hours cover to pay. Every caller gets the same warm, accurate response at eleven at night as they would at the height of brunch.

Yes. If you run a small group of plant-based restaurants, Zavo can answer for each site with its own menu, diary, sittings, and free-from policy, while giving you one view across the lot. A caller reaches a host that knows that location's room and availability, not a generic call centre that can't tell your flagship from your second site. Opening hours, escalation contacts, and call handling can all differ from one restaurant to the next. Reporting rolls up so you can compare call volumes, booked covers, and captured catering leads site by site, and spot where the phone is quietly costing trade. Whether you've one room or several, every caller is answered consistently and their booking reaches the right team.

It helps in two ways that add up. First, you stop losing calls: the cover and catering enquiries that used to ring out mid-service or after hours are answered and booked, so more of the demand you've worked to attract actually lands. Second, every enquiry arrives logged and tidy, so you follow up the catering leads faster and more consistently — and speed of reply is often what wins an event over the restaurant down the road. Most plant-based restaurants see more covers seated and more catering enquiries captured within the first few weeks, simply because nothing is being dropped. We'd sooner you measured it on your own till: Zavo logs every call, booking, and lead, so you can weigh what it brings in against what you pay.

No — it only ever says what you've set it to say. Zavo isn't improvising; it works from the menu and details you give it about your restaurant, so it won't invent a tasting menu that isn't on, quote a private-hire price you haven't set, or promise a table you don't have. If a caller asks something outside what it knows, it takes their details and passes the question to you rather than guessing. You can listen back to any call, see exactly what was said, and tighten its answers whenever you like — adding the questions your regulars actually ask or refining how it describes a dish. The everyday questions get fast, accurate answers, and anything needing real judgement still reaches a person.

Yes, and it makes a real difference to a small kitchen's covers. The moment a table or event is booked, Zavo sends a confirmation by text so the guest has the details and your diary is current. It sends a reminder the day before, which is one of the simplest ways to cut the no-shows that hurt a restaurant working to tight margins. If a table cancels late or doesn't show, it can flag it so you re-let the space rather than leave it empty during service. It can also follow up after a private dinner to capture feedback or tee up the next booking. All of this happens automatically, so your covers hold firmer and your team doesn't spend the afternoon ringing round to confirm.

Most plant-based restaurants go live the same day and are fully settled within a few days. There's no kit to buy and nothing to install in the kitchen. You switch your existing number over to Zavo, connect your booking diary, and tell it the essentials — your menu, your sittings, your free-from policy, and how you like different enquiries handled. Right from its first call it speaks in your restaurant's name and tone, and you can replay any conversation and fine-tune its answers as you go. Connecting your diary on the technical side is something we take care of. Most owners find the biggest task is simply writing down how they want things handled — which is a useful exercise in itself.

That's completely fine — plenty of independent restaurants do. Zavo connects to the main booking systems out of the box, but it doesn't need one to be useful. If you run a spreadsheet, a bespoke allergen matrix, or a paper diary, it can still take every booking and enquiry, note it down in a tidy, structured form, and get it to you whichever way works — a text, an email, or a shared sheet your team checks before each shift — so nothing is lost and you stay in control of the diary. When you're ready to move to a digital system, Zavo connects straight to it. You won't be left out because you run your bookings your own way, and you're never forced to change how your restaurant works to use it.