A TALK BY MIKE LITMAN

Week One

What happens when you call 50 London restaurants with an AI voice agent

MARCH 2026

THE CONCEPT

50 restaurants. One question. Every Saturday.

At 1pm every Saturday, an AI voice agent calls London's top 50 restaurants and asks: "If I popped in now, would there be much of a wait?"

ELEVENLABS TWILIO CLAUDE RAILWAY NETLIFY

SUCCESS RATE

23%

→

69%

First run to final count. Same infrastructure, same day. Three iterations.

"We are happy to get you in and get you a little perch and get you a glass of wine while you wait for a table."

NOBLE ROT, BLOOMSBURY

"Just run that way on the left. Yeah? Turn to the left over here. Yeah. Downstairs."

TAYYABS, WHITECHAPEL – GIVING WALKING DIRECTIONS TO AN AI

"I already say yes. Can I know your name, please?"

THE PARADISE, KENSAL GREEN – LOSING PATIENCE WITH THE AI

INSIGHT

7

Seven Dishooms. One identical IVR.

Every location plays the same message: walk-ins for groups under six after 6pm. That uniformity is the finding. The walk-in experience is centralised, not left to managers. We don't need to call them weekly. We need to monitor when the message changes.

LEARNING

3

AI callers need social skills, not just a script

Trullo asked for a name. The agent panicked and hung up. Paradise said "sure, come in." The agent kept asking. The fix was not technical. It was social. Teach the agent to say "Sam." Teach it to wait. Teach it that "sure" means yes.

LEARNING

4

The classifier was throwing away our best data

Mangal 2: zero wait, marked as failed. Franco Manca: "Be soon," marked as failed. The AI analysing transcripts was too strict. Rewriting the prompt to be generous nearly doubled our successful count from 10 to 24.

FAILURE

Everything broke.

The server processed 83 transcripts, saved the results, then the container restarted. The file vanished. Ephemeral storage.

Everything recovered.

Raw conversations were permanently stored in ElevenLabs. A recovery script pulled every conversation, matched by timestamp, reprocessed locally. The architecture was fragile. The data was not.

LEARNING

1pm

River Cafe: closed
Trullo: closed
The Barbary: voicemail
Berenjak: voicemail

6pm

River Cafe: "We open at six PM, sir"
Trullo: "We open at six"
The Barbary: answered
Berenjak: answered

A single call time is a design choice that excludes certain restaurants.

REFRAME

Phone Ghost is data, not failure.

Caravan's IVR: "We welcome walk-ins with open arms." Smokestak: "Visit our website." Every automated message reveals how a restaurant thinks about spontaneous diners.

THE REAL INSIGHT

The quotes are the product.

Nobody remembers the average wait was 4 minutes. Everyone remembers Noble Rot offering wine, Tayyabs giving directions, and Paradise losing patience.

WEEK 1 RANKINGS

01 E. Pellicci 25 min

02 Noble Rot 15 min

ZERO WAIT

40 Maltby St, Ducksoup, Franco Manca, Lahore Kebab House, Mangal 2, Paradise, Tayyabs

29 of 42 venues with real data. Updated every Saturday at thequeueindex.com

Week Two runs next Saturday.

Staggered call times. Better social skills. Hardened pipeline.

SEE THE DATA

thequeueindex.com

GET IN TOUCH

hello@mikelitman.me

Get notified when I publish new decks →