Tableify AI Event Manager for restaurants

What Nora knows before a planner writes

An AI event manager is only as good as the facts behind it. Nora starts from what your restaurant has already published: each room with its capacity and its own Book Now or Inquire link, the live menu, the events on your calendar, and any deposits, minimums, per-person prices and cancellation terms you chose to show for a room. She can also see which dates a room already has bookings on. She never sees, and never says, whose bookings they are.

At Loreley Beer Garden on New York's Lower East Side, where Nora has answered party inquiries since May 2026, those facts are three spaces with published sizes. The Loreley case study shows the rest of that setup.

On top of the published pages comes whatever you teach her: up to 200 questions with your answers, 20 documents such as an event packet or a party menu, and 50 public links. Where your written rules and her defaults disagree, yours win.

• The Garden Party: long picnic tables that seat up to 8 guests each, with heaters in winter and fans in summer.
• The Garden Room: the indoor garden room, seating up to 22.
• The Party Room and Lounge: up to 65 guests, with lounge seating and a private bar of its own.

One planner, six questions, during the lunch rush

Here is how one conversation runs, built on the beer garden's published facts. The planner and the messages are an example, not a transcript. It is 12:41pm on a Friday and every manager is on the floor for lunch when an Instagram message arrives: a baby shower for 25, a Sunday afternoon three weeks out, somewhere with a little privacy.

Question one is fit, and Nora does not stretch a room to make a sale. The Garden Room seats up to 22, so she says it runs a little small for 25 and offers the two spaces that do fit: a few picnic tables in the Garden Party, at up to 8 guests a table, or the Party Room and Lounge, which holds up to 65. She shares the Inquire link for each, because each room books through its own page on the restaurant's website.

The planner likes the garden and asks whether it gets cold in the fall. The Garden Party page says the garden has heaters in winter and fans in summer, so that is what Nora says, and nothing more.

Question two: the minimum, word for word

Next the planner asks whether the garden has a minimum. The beer garden publishes one on its Garden Party page: garden tables come with a $500 food and beverage minimum, plus tax and gratuity. Nora gives the planner exactly that. She does not work out what several tables would come to, round the figure, or add conditions the page never states.

That restraint is the whole point. A minimum quoted wrong in a chat turns into an argument at the deposit. When the published line is all a planner hears from Nora, the number your manager confirms later matches what the guest already read. If a room has no published pricing at all, she says the team will share it and moves on to the next question.

Questions three and four: a date and a discount

Question three is the date. Nora checks which dates the garden already has bookings on and tells the planner that Sunday looks open. She does not hold it and does not confirm it; she says plainly that the team confirms every booking. Had the date been taken, she would have said so without a word about whose party it was.

Question four is the one every manager knows: could you go lower on the minimum, since it is a Sunday afternoon? Nora does not haggle and does not invent a discount. She says the final quote comes from the team. A planner hesitating over price is also one of the moments that sends your team an alert by email or text, with a one-line summary such as a shower for 25 asking about the garden minimum. Each lead raises that alert at most once in six hours, so a long chat never buzzes a manager again and again during service.

Questions five and six: a card number and a person

Question five arrives as a string of digits. Keen to lock the date, the planner types a card number into the chat. Nora never asks for card details and never repeats them. A typed card number is hidden before anyone on your team sees it, and she explains kindly why a chat is not the place for it. The deposit is something the planner settles with your team.

Question six comes right after: wait, am I talking to a real person? Nora answers honestly. She is the restaurant's virtual assistant, she speaks for the restaurant as we, and she offers to bring someone from the team in. She never claims to be staff. A question about a refund would get an equally fixed answer: Nora never refunds and never promises one, and the guest hears that our team will be in touch shortly.

The handoff note, and the pause that follows

All along, Nora has been saving details on the lead as they come in: a name, then a phone number, then an email, then the headcount, date, time and room, asked one at a time and never twice if the planner skips one. If the shower shrinks from 25 to 20 in a later message, the lead says 20. Once the chat has been quiet for five minutes, she writes one short handoff note: the occasion, the garden, the reaction to the minimum, the request for a lower price, and the hidden card number.

At 2:20pm lunch winds down. The manager opens the lead in Tableify CRM, reads the note and writes to the planner directly. From that reply, Nora steps out of the conversation for as long as the channel is set to: 30 minutes for Instagram, Facebook and website chat out of the box, two hours for texts, or anything up to a full day, or until someone hands it back.

Two more controls sit behind that. A reply on any channel can pause every channel for that guest, and you can pick a pipeline stage past which Nora never writes to a lead again, while your team gets a single Your turn alert.

Four channels, each with its own switch

Nora works the chat on your website, text messages, Instagram messages and Facebook Messenger. Texts, Instagram and Facebook each have three settings: off, where messages still reach your team; drafts, where Nora writes the reply and a person decides whether to send it; and answering. Website chat has a switch of its own, and one button turns every channel off at once. Texts begin once your restaurant's own texting number is approved.

Each channel shapes the conversation. Website chat collects the guest's name, email, phone and party size before the first message, so Nora greets them by first name and skips those questions. Instagram and Facebook arrive with only a profile name, which is why the lunch-rush planner above was asked for contact details one by one. A photo or a voice note she cannot open gets a warm request to type it out. Phone calls still go to your staff.

Messages that are not parties, and where to start

An inbox that answers parties also hears from everyone else. Nora sorts three kinds of sender who are not guests: creators, influencers and press; vendors and sales pitches; and job seekers. For each you write what she should say and where to send them, such as an email for media kits or your careers page. Leave one blank and she thanks them, says the team handles these directly, and takes their name, contact and proposal.

A sensible way to start is narrow: drafts on Instagram for a week, then answering on website chat, then texts once the team has read enough of her replies. Nora sits inside the larger events setup on the private event software page, beside the other specialists on the AI staff page, and her party leads sit beside reservations on your own site for regular tables. If you are still weighing how much of the first conversation to hand over, the fit checklist is a fair place to start.