The human gate
Quotes, prep sheets, and texts all pause at a person — the owner, the kitchen, the host. Nothing sends without sign-off.
Supper, at the river's pace.
Relish tray first. Old fashioned second — brandy, sweet, don't ask twice. Then the walleye, or the prime rib if it's Saturday, and a grasshopper if you've been good. The Water Street has done it this way for seventy years. The only thing that's new is the back office.
Hours
Tue–Thu 4:00–9:00 · Fri & Sat 4:00–10:00 · Sun 11:00–8:00 · Mon the river gets us back
01 · The ritual
The order never changes.
People drive an hour for this and they don't come for surprises. They come because the fish is fried to order, the prime rib is carved where you can see it, and the bartender remembers. We wrote it down anyway.
The relish tray
Carrots, radishes, pickled herring, and the good crackers, on the table before your coat's off. Nobody ordered it. Nobody had to.
The old fashioned
Brandy, muddled sugar, a splash of sweet soda. If you say "whiskey, sour," Lou will make it and quietly note it in his heart.
The supper
Walleye on Friday, prime rib on Saturday, broasted chicken any day that ends in y. Choice of potato. The baked comes wrapped in foil like a gift, because it is.
The grasshopper
Ice cream, crème de menthe, and the firm belief that dessert should also be a drink. One straw, two spoons.
03 · The back room
Sixty chairs and every kind of toast.
Rehearsal dinners, fiftieth anniversaries, retirement parties, the Legion's steak fry, and more than a few celebrations of a life well lived. The back room seats sixty with the long tables in, has its own bar, and looks out at the river through the good windows.
Here's what changed: the enquiries used to sit in the answering machine until Tuesday. Now the Back Room Book below reads them the minute they arrive, checks the calendar, and drafts the quote — and the owner still reads every word over coffee before it goes out. Answered before the place across the river has read theirs.
04 · The workflow
The Back Room Book.
Three pages from the owner's book: event enquiries, the weekend forecast, and the Friday waitlist. The AI reads, checks, and drafts. The owner — or the host at the door — approves every single send. That's the whole system.
Demo data — nothing here is realBuilt for event-night kitchens and the owner working the line while the phone rings. Every number below is invented; every step genuinely runs, right here in your browser.
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What the book read, and the draft quote
Draft — the owner reads it over coffee before it sends
Forecasting a Saturday
Reservations on the book, the town's festival calendar, and last year's counts — folded into one prep sheet. It's a suggestion the kitchen confirms, never an order. Festival weekend surge included, because Riverwalk Days doubles the walk-ins and nobody warns the fryer.
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The prep sheet lands here
Friday night at the door
Walk-ins go on the text-back list and nobody has to hover by the host stand. When a table clears, the book drafts the text; the host reads it and sends it without leaving the door.
AI may
Read enquiries, pull out size, date, occasion, and menu; check the room calendar; total a quote from the banquet menu; draft every message.
AI may not
Promise the room, set a price on its own, text a guest, or tell the kitchen what to do. It drafts; people decide.
Data boundary
Everything here is invented and stays in your browser. No enquiry, name, or number is uploaded or stored anywhere.
05 · How this demo works
Honest about the machine.
The Back Room Book is a working demonstration, not a picture of one. The enquiry desk genuinely parses whatever you type — party size, "the second Saturday in June," the walleye — and checks it against a room calendar before drafting a quote from the banquet menu. In production those steps run through a small language model behind DID's demo backend; here, rule-based versions answer so the page works anywhere, with no keys and no account.
What stays with a person: the send. The owner reads every quote, the kitchen confirms every prep sheet, the host sends every text. And to say it plainly — the restaurant, the guests, the phone numbers, and every dollar figure on this page are fictional.