Conversational Marketing for Restaurants: More Catering Orders

Most restaurants have plenty of people who want to order from them. What they lack is someone to answer at the moment a guest is deciding. A guest who wants to book a table for 14, a company planning a lunch for 30, or a regular who has not been in since the summer all have a question, and the question usually arrives when the team is busy cooking and serving. The answer decides whether the order or the booking happens, and whether it happens with you.

Off-premises sales have also become a bigger share of the business. In the National Restaurant Association's 2026 State of the Restaurant Industry report, 45 percent of full-service operators and 58 percent of limited-service operators said their off-premises sales were higher than in 2019¹. Catering is the largest single ticket in that mix, and it is also the order most likely to need a conversation before anyone pays.

This guide covers conversational marketing for restaurants: how to answer reservation and large-party questions by text, how to reply to catering inquiries and quotes fast enough to win them, how to bring lapsed regulars back, how to ask for reviews within the rules, and how to measure the whole program against a holdout. It is written for owners, general managers, catering and events managers and marketing leads at independent restaurants and small groups.

What does the guest journey look like for a restaurant?

A restaurant guest asks different questions at each stage, and each unanswered one has a cost. Before a booking or an order, the cost is the sale. On the day, it is a bad experience. After the visit, it is the next visit.

Moment	What the guest is asking	What a fast, human answer looks like
Large-party reservation	Can you seat 14 on Saturday, and is there a set menu?	Checks the book, offers a time that works, explains the deposit and the set menu in plain words.
Catering inquiry	Can you feed 30 by 11:45 on Friday, with vegan and nut-free options?	Confirms the date and headcount, answers the dietary question, sends a quote the same day.
Quote sent, no reply	Is this the right package, and can the price move?	One short follow-up that asks what is holding the order up, and answers it.
Lapsed regular	Is the place still worth the trip?	A personal note about what is new, with an offer the owner approved.
After the visit or the event	Did anyone notice how it went?	Thanks the guest, fixes anything left open, then asks for an honest review.

Each of these guests has already contacted you once: they filled in a form, called, booked or ordered before. Answer them while they are still choosing.

How should you answer reservation and large-party questions by text?

A table for two books itself online. A table for 14 rarely does. Many reservation systems cap the party size a guest can book online, so larger groups end up on the phone or in a contact form, and those messages arrive in the middle of service when nobody can pick up. A text thread lets the guest ask, and lets your team answer between tables.

What a good first reply says

• Names the date, the time and the party size. "Saturday at 7 for 14" tells the guest a person read the request.
• Answers the question in full. The deposit, the set menu or the minimum spend, the room or the section, how long the table is held.
• Offers one next step. A link to confirm and pay the deposit, or one alternative time if the first is gone.

In a composite example based on common restaurant conversations, not a real exchange, it reads: "Hi, this is the events team. We can seat 14 on Saturday at 7:30 in the back room. For groups that size we offer two set menus and take a deposit to hold the room. Want me to send both menus?"

Confirm the big tables before the day

A no-show at a table for 14 costs a whole section of the dining room for a night. Text large parties two or three days ahead to confirm the headcount, and again on the day with arrival details. Ask a question they can answer in a word ("Still 14, or has the number changed?") so the reply is easy. When the number drops, you can release seats to the waitlist instead of holding an empty table.

Ask about allergies at the same time. A group dinner or an event usually includes someone with a dietary need, and the kitchen needs to know before the day, not when the plates go out.

How fast should you reply to a catering inquiry?

As fast as you can, and within the same working day at the latest. A catering inquiry is often sent to several restaurants at once by someone with a deadline and a budget. The first restaurant that answers clearly, with a menu and a price, has the best chance of getting the order. The second may never hear back.

The orders are worth answering. ezCater's 2025 Feeding the Workplace report, based on order data and surveys of more than 2,300 workplace food buyers, operators and employees, put the average workplace order at $420, up 12%, with average headcount up 9% to 25². The same report found that 43% of organizations had a recurring meal program, 60% of orderers planned to spend more on workplace food, and 70% of employees who first tried a restaurant through an employer-provided meal later ordered from it on their own².

That last figure is the reason catering is a marketing channel as well as a sales one. One office lunch puts your food in front of 25 people who may come back as regular guests.

The questions to ask in the first reply

1. Date, time and delivery address. Confirm you can do it before anything else. If you cannot, say so and offer the nearest slot.
2. Headcount. Ask for a number, and whether it might change.
3. Dietary needs and allergies. Vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free and any allergies. Federal law recognizes sesame as the 9th major food allergen, alongside milk, eggs, fish, shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat and soybeans³. Answer allergy questions only from your kitchen's own written information.
4. Budget or package. Offer two or three standard packages with per-person prices rather than a custom quote from scratch.
5. Setup. Drop-off, set up and leave, or staffed service.

Follow up on quotes that go quiet

Many quotes go quiet because the buyer got busy, not because they said no. A simple schedule works for most restaurants:

• Same day: the quote, with one question ("Does the 11:45 delivery still work?").
• Next working day: one short follow-up that asks what is holding the order up.
• Two days before the order cutoff: a last note with the cutoff time, then stop.

When the buyer replies with a question about price, headcount or a dish, a person should answer it. A third templated reminder does not answer "can we swap the chicken for the salmon?"

How do you bring lapsed regulars back?

A regular who stops coming rarely announces it. Their visits space out, then stop. Most restaurants notice months later, if at all. The point of a win-back message is to reach them while the habit is still recent.

• Define "lapsed" for your restaurant. For a weekly lunch spot, four weeks without a visit is a signal. For a special-occasion dining room, it may be six months.
• Write as the restaurant, not as a coupon. "We added the short rib back to the menu" reads as news. A bare discount code with a deadline reads as a blast.
• Use one offer the owner approved. A dessert on the house or a reserved table on a quiet night costs little and is easy to say yes to.
• Answer the reply. A lapsed regular who writes back "we moved across town" or "the last visit was slow" is telling you something a person should answer.

Text only guests who agreed to receive marketing texts from you, and stop when they ask you to. A guest who opted in at the host stand two years ago and never heard from you since may not remember agreeing, so introduce the restaurant by name in the first line.

How should you ask for reviews?

Reviews decide where new guests eat, and they are read more often than before. In BrightLocal's 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey, 41% of consumers said they always read reviews when browsing for businesses, up from 29% the year before, and 74% said they only care about reviews written in the last three months⁴. A steady flow of recent reviews matters more than a large pile of old ones.

The order matters. Before you ask for a review, check whether the guest complained during the visit or the event, and whether it was fixed. A review request sent to a guest with an open complaint invites a bad review.

The rules are strict. The FTC's Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials makes it unlawful to offer compensation or other incentives in exchange for, or conditioned on, reviews expressing a particular sentiment, and it bars review suppression, such as unfounded legal threats or intimidation to stop a review⁵. Google's Maps policy does not allow businesses to offer incentives such as payment, discounts or free services in exchange for posting any review⁶. In practice: ask every guest the same way, offer nothing in return, and leave the rating to the guest.

How does Profiles bring guest data into one profile?

A restaurant's guest data is spread across systems. The point of sale knows what a guest ordered. The reservation system knows party sizes and no-shows. The catering tool knows the office that orders every month, and the loyalty program knows who has not been in. When those records do not share a guest, a regular gets a "we miss you" text the day after a visit, or a review request goes to a guest whose event went wrong.

Profiles, VYG's customer data platform, builds one living profile per guest from the systems a restaurant already runs, and matches the same person across devices and email addresses. The office manager who books catering and the guest who dines on Fridays show up as one person. Segments such as lapsed regulars or big-party bookers update themselves as the profile changes. Teams can ask Profiles questions in plain English, including through Claude and ChatGPT over MCP.

How does Workflows automate the routine messages?

Workflows, which is in beta, runs flows that read the whole profile, so a message can branch on history instead of the last click. A win-back message can skip a guest who visited last week at another location. A review request can wait until a complaint is resolved. A large-party confirmation can go out on schedule, and a reply that changes the headcount can go to a person. One flow can mix email, SMS and human steps, so the routine messages go out on time and anything that needs judgment goes to someone who can decide.

When should a real person step in with Conversations?

VYG Conversations is the human in the loop. When a guest stalls, pushes back, asks something off-script or needs a judgment call, a trained person reads the moment and replies by text. Agents are trained on the restaurant's menu, policies and voice before they send a text, and every conversation is written back to the guest profile.

For a restaurant that means the catering inquiry that arrives during the dinner rush, the quote that went quiet, the group of 14 asking about the set menu, and the regular who replied "we moved." Agents text as your restaurant, answer menu, headcount and delivery questions from the information you give them, and send the order or booking link when the guest is ready. They spend their time where one conversation can bring in a large order, such as catering, private events and large parties. Allergy answers come only from your kitchen's written information, and anything it does not cover goes to a manager.

How does FDE connect the systems you already run?

FDE is VYG's forward deployed engineering service. VYG engineers join the team in Slack, connect the systems the restaurant runs on to Profiles, build the first flows with the team and handle web changes, for one monthly fee. Point of sale systems such as Toast and Square, reservation tools such as OpenTable and SevenRooms, and catering tools such as ezCater and Tripleseat are built on request during setup. The restaurants page lists which ones.

What rules apply to texting restaurant guests?

The restaurant is responsible for following every rule below. This section explains what they require; it is not legal advice, and you should get your own.

• Consent. Send marketing texts only to guests who agreed to receive them from you, and keep a record of where and when each guest agreed. A reply about a reservation or a catering inquiry the guest started is different from a promotion, but keep it about that booking or order.
• Quiet hours. Federal rules bar telephone solicitations to residential subscribers before 8 a.m. or after 9 p.m., local time at the called party's location⁷. Several states set narrower windows. A late-night "we have a table tonight" blast is the kind of text these rules cover.
• Opt-outs. A request to stop must be honored within a reasonable time not to exceed ten business days⁷. A stop reply should stop every marketing message, at every location.
• Allergens. Answer allergy questions only from your kitchen's own information, and never promise an allergen-free dish your kitchen cannot guarantee³.
• Reviews. No incentives for reviews of a particular sentiment, and no review suppression⁵.

Every abandoned cart flow I've ever built is a monologue.

More emails, tighter timing, better subject lines, SMS, push. We keep adding layers, but the customer stopped listening after the second email.

That post is about online checkout reminders, but a catering follow-up sequence can have the same shape: another email about the quote, another templated text, and nobody answering the question the buyer asked about the vegan tray.

How do you get started and measure it with a holdout?

Last-touch attribution overstates what any follow-up program does. Some catering buyers would have ordered anyway, and some regulars would have come back on their own. Measure the difference instead:

1. Start with your baseline. Count catering inquiries, quotes sent and orders placed each week, and large-party requests and confirmed tables. Time your own replies to test inquiries.
2. Hold out a random slice. Keep, for example, one in ten catering inquiries and one in ten lapsed regulars out of the new conversations, and handle them the old way.
3. Compare over a fair window. Catering orders are often placed a week or more ahead, so compare order rates between the two groups over several weeks.
4. Tag every conversation. Dietary question, headcount, delivery time, price, set menu, deposit. The tags show which answers your website and your forms are missing.
5. Count only the difference. Report the lift over the holdout as the result, separately for catering, large parties and returning regulars.

Use clear benchmarks. When a real person reaches out, a reply rate of 10-15% is good and 15-25% is excellent. Businesses typically see a 10-20X return on investment from those conversations. Hotels face the same problem with rate and room questions; the guide to conversational marketing for hotels covers it.

To watch a real person answer a catering inquiry or a large-party question by text, see Conversations in action.