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Writing your venue's AI context

The AI context is the single most important thing you’ll write to make the AI assistant sound like your restaurant rather than a generic chatbot. It’s one markdown page, in Settings → AI context, that the AI reads every time it answers a question about your venue.

This page is for owners and chefs who are about to write that page for the first time, or who want to revise it. After this, you’ll know the five things to include, the things to leave out (because they’re already structured somewhere else), and the worked examples that turn a vague paragraph into a sharp one.

What it does

When a customer asks the menu AI “what’s your house style?” or a waiter asks the coaching AI “what should I suggest with the carbonara?”, the AI does not invent an answer. It reads three layers (see How the AI thinks about your menu): the live menu, the structured catalogue of facts, and the narrative you wrote. The AI context is the venue-level half of the narrative layer. The other half is the per-dish description and per-dish internal notes (see Writing good dish descriptions).

The AI context is markdown. The system splits it by ## headings into chunks, and at AI query time it pulls the chunks that match the question. So a customer asking about wine pulls your ## House pairings section; a customer asking about who runs the kitchen pulls your ## Chef bio. The more clearly you organise the sections, the sharper the answers.

How to use it

Where to go

Admin → Settings → AI context. Owner-only. One big textarea. Save button. You can edit it as often as you like — there is no draft state, every save is live.

The five sections to write first

About 500–1500 words across these five ## headings. Skip a section if you genuinely have nothing to say, but most venues have something for each.

## Philosophy

A paragraph on what your restaurant stands for. Not marketing speak — the actual sentence the chef uses when a guest asks “what kind of place is this?”. One or two sentences is enough. Examples:

We cook the food the chef’s grandmother cooked, with whatever the market sent us this week. No winter menu — the menu changes with the season.

A natural-wine bar with a tight Sardinian kitchen. Nothing is on the menu that wasn’t on a table in Cagliari thirty years ago.

## Voice

How your team describes food. The words you say, the words you don’t say, the level of detail you offer unprompted. This is the section that most often changes how the AI sounds. Examples:

We say guanciale, not pancetta. We keep Italian names when we have them. We do not list every ingredient in a description — we tell the story of one.

We never recommend Bordeaux — natural wine only. If a guest asks for “a big red,” we steer toward Etna Rosso.

## Sourcing principles

The why of your suppliers. Do not list which suppliers you use — those names already live in the inventory items (see the rule below). Write only what is not already structured: why you chose them, what makes them different. Examples:

We pick suppliers for what they care about, not what they cost. Our 00 flour is stone-milled the day we bake, which is why the dough takes a full 48 hours to ferment without breaking.

The fish supplier changes every morning — we buy from whoever has the cleanest catch at the market. So the kind of fish on the menu changes daily; the supplier is whoever the chef trusted that day.

## Chef bio

Two or three sentences. Where the chef trained, what they cook, what they care about. Examples:

Chef Marco trained at Don Alfonso 1890 in Sant’Agata for four years, then opened this kitchen in 2017. He’s from a town near Naples that doesn’t appear on most maps.

Chef Anna grew up cooking with her grandmother in Modica, Sicily. The menu rotates between dishes she remembers from that kitchen and dishes she has been working on since.

## Signature dishes

For each of your 2–4 signature dishes, one paragraph. Not the recipe (that’s in the recipes screen), not the description (that’s on the menu item) — the story. Why it’s on the menu, who taught the chef, what year it first appeared, anything a guest would find interesting. Example:

Pasta al limone. The chef’s mother’s recipe. The lemons are from a single tree on his uncle’s property in Sorrento; we drive a case up every two weeks during the season. The dish appears on the menu only when the lemons arrive and disappears when they run out — usually four to six months a year.

The rule that decides what NOT to write here

The narrative never duplicates the operational data.

If the supplier name is on the inventory item, do not retype it here. If the grape is on the wine attribute, do not retype it here. If the price is on the POS, do not retype it here. The AI reads those directly.

Write only the why, the story, the voice — never the what.

This is the rule that keeps the AI context small (500–1500 words) instead of bloating into a parallel database of facts that drift out of sync with the rest of the system. If you ever find yourself listing supplier names or prices in your AI context, stop — those go in the proper place.

Full reasoning: Where your information lives — five places, one restaurant.

What to keep updating

  • Voice drift. When your team finds itself saying something to guests three times, write it down once so the AI says it too.
  • Seasonal shifts. When a section of the menu changes shape with the seasons, update the relevant section (philosophy, signature dishes) to reflect it.
  • New chef bio. When a chef changes, the bio section is the only thing in the system that updates the way the AI introduces them.
  • House pairings that worked. When a pairing the team has been recommending works well at the table, add a line to your voice or signature-dish section. The AI will quote it from then on.

What happens behind the scenes

When you save, the system splits the markdown by ## headings into chunks, builds a small mathematical fingerprint of each chunk (an embedding), and stores both. When the AI answers a question, it finds the chunks with fingerprints closest to the question and reads them. The more specifically you organise your sections and the more concrete your prose, the more reliably the AI surfaces the right chunk for the right question.

For a customer asking about wine, the House pairings chunk wins. For a customer asking about how you source ingredients, the Sourcing principles chunk wins. For a waiter asking what to say about a specific signature dish, the matching paragraph in Signature dishes wins. The AI never invents — it quotes from what you wrote.

Examples

  • 🍕 A two-paragraph AI context that already does a lot — A small osteria writes only two paragraphs: a philosophy line (“seasonal, no winter menu”) and a chef bio (“Marco, ex-Don Alfonso, opened 2017”). The AI uses these on every dish recommendation, every “tell me about this place” question. Adequate. The team adds sections over time as they learn what guests ask.

  • 🍷 A wine-focused AI context — A natural-wine bar invests almost their entire AI context in the Voice and House pairings sections. The AI’s wine recommendations become razor-sharp because the venue’s preferences are clearly stated. Other sections (philosophy, sourcing) are short.

  • ⚠️ A common mistake: listing suppliers — An owner writes “we use Mulino Marino for the flour, Caseificio Stagni for the mozzarella, Pasta Vera for the pistachio cream, Bordin for the mortadella…” — 200 words of supplier names. Don’t. Those names are already on each inventory item; the AI reads them directly. Replace those 200 words with one paragraph on why you picked these suppliers — the chef’s actual reasoning. The AI then combines the why (from here) with the who (from inventory) automatically.

  • ⚠️ Another mistake: writing on every dish — An owner writes a paragraph per dish in the AI context, with name, description, and price. Don’t. Per-dish descriptions go on the menu item itself. The AI context is for cross-cutting stuff — philosophy, voice, signature stories. If a dish needs more than the public description, use the Internal notes field on that dish.

  • 🎁 A great chef bio that the AI will use forever — Two sentences: “Chef Anna was a pastry chef in Lyon for six years before moving to Sicily to take over her aunt’s bakery in Modica. The pastry section of our menu is her doing; the savoury menu rotates monthly between her aunt’s recipes and her own experiments.” The AI quotes from this whenever a guest asks about the chef, about the pastry section, or about why the menu rotates. One paragraph, lots of use.