Now hiring: hospitable voice bots

Steve Jobs would've loved this! A restaurant that once famously turned him away taps AI to staff the phones: an Expedite Q&A

The walk-in friendly bar at Flour + Water / photo credit: Krescent Carasso

Almost 15 years ago, Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs was turned away at the door¹ of San Francisco pizza and pasta hotspot Flour + Water. It was a moment perfectly centered in the Venn diagram of my interests: a legendary techie stymied by the real-life frustration of waiting in a line and subsequently failing to snag a popular table — in my neighborhood, no less!

It’s easier to get a seat now, and I suspect a tech boost or a different door policy would have changed the outcome for the visionary founder today. (We’ll sadly never know.) But as a post-Jobs Apple readies the release of some transformative AI of its own, so has Flour + Water embraced this rapidly evolving technology, tapping a young voice AI startup to answer its phones.

In a recently unearthed clip from 1983, Jobs is heard describing futuristic technology that sounds a lot like today’s artificial intelligence: a machine that would capture someone’s “underlying spirit, or underlying set of principles, or any underlying way of looking at the world.”

Jobs was talking about Aristotle here, not a restaurant host. But the spirit, principles, and even worldview of a seasoned and hospitable host is a valuable asset. Even so, Amanda Flores, the director of operations at San Francisco’s Flour + Water Hospitality Group, was more excited about outsourcing the restaurant’s phone lines to a bot than I expected.

I’m not sure why this surprised me. Maybe I have my own outdated notions about in-person hospitality. Maybe it’s that I rarely call restaurants myself. Maybe I’m skeptical that people are ready to start picking up their phones after spending so many years texting instead.

I’m clearly wrong². 

“It’s been a really nice change,” Flores told me in a recent interview. 

Flour + Water works with a local startup, Maitre D AI, built by co-founders Randall Hom, an Instacart product designer-turned-restaurateur, and Brendan Wood, previously a founding engineer at an AI startup.

Maitre D is young. It’s taken a small round of friends and family funding; Hom is still hands-on with restaurant clients as they work to build and improve the product. That makes this particular example feel like an honest and, daresay, a relatable process in what is still very early days of helpful voice AI. (When Hom implemented the tech at his restaurant, he described it as “almost a euphoric experience” to hear the AI respond to calls.)

I talked to Flour + Water’s Flores about implementing the new technology, which, in a matter of weeks, helped the restaurant learn more about its diners. Chiefly, they call… a lot.

Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

Expedite: Why did you decide to implement AI technology for phone calls? Was it an easy decision? 

Amanda Flores, Flour + Water Hospitality: “We try to stay ahead of the game. Before Covid, we had a formal office and admin teams that answered the phone. It was a really nice touch. But their workday ended at five or six o'clock, and guests had trouble reaching us during service. It was impossible to bring back the position of someone sitting in a room, answering a phone after Covid. We want to pay people fairly, and labor in restaurants is already such a high percentage of our operating costs.

“I really value restaurants that still have that human touch. That’s obviously the ideal scenario. In fact, I called [nearby, notable restaurant] Foreign Cinema the other day and someone answered.”

A person! I agree that’s ideal, but have heard it’s increasingly unsustainable. 

“We had to find a way to meet in the middle. During Covid we had a set voice message on our phone line, and we worked to make sure it included as much information as possible.” 

I remember that message. It was very long.