A couple of weeks ago, I spoke to a group of fine dining chefs from around the world about artificial intelligence in restaurants. Their familiarity and excitement around the technology surprised me, as did some of the immediate use cases and success they shared.
AI is a hot topic with high stakes in the hospitality business.. A summer survey from consulting firm Deloitte found that 8 out of 10 restaurant executives planned to increase investment in AI over the next year, mainly to improve the customer experience.
Fine dining restaurants obsess over customer experience — they’re about as high-touch as you can get — but they aren’t necessarily where even the most tech-savvy diner wants to find in-your-face technology. Still, the chefs told me they’d welcome tools that can make an exceptional dining experience even better.
The Deloitte survey didn’t ask for customer experience details, so I asked ChatGPT: How can AI make a diner’s restaurant experience better? It suggested personalizing service based on enhanced diner profiles, predictive table management and smart alerts for staff, and back-office heavy lifting like schedule optimization and inventory forecasting — all functions poised to make a big impact in even the most visibly tech-free restaurants.
With varying degrees of understanding and familiarity with AI in restaurants, the assembled chefs were keen to learn more. Plenty of them — more than half — were already using AI to help in small but increasingly important ways. This was an off-the-record event, so I’m not sharing names of chefs nor their restaurants. But I will share their ideas and experiences for making the best restaurants even better:
For plate design and composition
Generative AI can’t put food on a plate, but it can inspire a professional to plate in a certain way. One chef I spoke to used generative AI to help design plates of food in a restaurant where food is plated with intentional precision.
For recipe tweaking
Pastry not quite right? Ice cream not fluffy enough? Just want to make a change? One chef said their restaurant’s pastry team has asked generative AI to suggest recipe tweaks to make the final product look, taste, and feel exactly how they want it to. They’ve also used it for help making allergy-friendly desserts. The results, they said, have been delicious.
For seasonality
Stateside every spring, someone jokes about the short ramp season in New York. The allium is reminiscent of spring onion, garlic, and leek and enjoys blissful notoriety on east coast menus for a (very) limited time. Restaurants that rely on seasonal produce, especially the kind of hyperlocal and seasonal produce that peaks for just a week or two during the year, can use AI to research and track peak seasonality, adjusting for factors like weather.
For menu and package design
A chef-restaurateur developing an associated line of packaged goods said they used AI for help with label design. The restaurant liked its current (human-designed) logo, so used generative AI to translate it into compelling package design.
For legal help
Here’s where I tell you I’m not a lawyer and neither is ChatGPT, nor Claude, Perplexity or any other generative AI program. But multiple chef-restaurateurs from different parts of the world told me they’ve consulted AI for legal help and advice related to employment and staffing issues. (All consulted with an actual attorney before implementing any suggestions.)
For translation and language learning
When you run a world-class destination, good communication is a form of hospitality. One chef explained how he, once the restaurant’s lone English speaker, uses generative AI to help teach staff English. More English-speaking guests are visiting, he explained, so he created a series of English lessons to give staff a crash course in vocabulary and pronunciation relating to service.
I also heard concerns.
The chefs were less excited about any level of AI-assisted personalization that might wedge itself between their restaurant and diner. Dining at their restaurants is a premium experience, they reasoned, and requires a heavy human touch. They were absolutely not interested in any AI assists that track customer behavior across disparate restaurants (“Our guest info is our IP,” they agreed.)
Still, the assembled chefs were excited about AI’s ability to optimize their time while saving money. They were acutely aware that much of this work could have been handled by a professional human and we talked through concerns about taking work away from fellow creatives and how reliance on AI could backfire. (We didn’t land on a solution but determined that being aware of the work you’re replacing is a good first step.)
I also heard what sounded like a tiny bit of concern that AI might take away some of the best parts of their jobs as hospitalitarians.
“What do you mean, exactly, by personalization?” one chef asked me. I said it could mean replicating his own hard-earned knowledge and understanding of the dining room or even a diner — replicating his brain, essentially — in a way that anyone working at the restaurant might understand.
I couldn’t read the emotion on his face when I answered, though he nodded politely, smiled, and sat back in his chair. It felt like a tiny recognition that maybe this emerging tech could make a real difference for the future, but only if it plays by the right rules.
