GoTab Helps All Restaurant Concepts Scale to Demand & Thrive

From casual and fine dining restaurants to food counters, ghost kitchens and all-day cafés

With operators relying on its restaurant commerce platform across 35 states, GoTab is helping all types of restaurants thrive by allowing them to scale their operations based on demand. Designed to adapt to any concepts, from casual and fine dining restaurants, food counters, all-day cafés to ghost kitchen operations, GoTab is the perfect cloud-based POS to provide a tailored guest experience, and allow operators to run lean, and profitable operations.

As more Americans get vaccinated, we’re seeing pent-up demand for restaurant and brewery experiences, and historically tight labor markets. GoTab offers an app-less, QR-based ordering solution that is efficient, easy to use, and allows them to scale based on demand.

Tim McLaughlin, CEO of GoTab

Re-Opening with Hospitality, Easing Labor Woes

As cities gradually lift dine-in restrictions, and guests sustain their takeout/delivery habits and seek out dine-in experiences, restaurants are seeing increased demand across all their channels. At D.C.-based Black Restaurant Group’s concepts Pearl Dive Oyster Palace and BlackSalt Fish Market and Restaurant, robust takeout business is now complemented by a high number of dine-in customers. With a historically tight labor market, they have been able to serve more guests with fewer staff in the restaurants that are using GoTab's restaurant POS for table service. “With GoTab, the experience is interactive. Guests can browse the menu with enticing imagery and order directly from their mobile phone,” said Jon Linck, Partner and Director of Operations at Black Restaurant Group. “People are coming out more and getting more comfortable. They’re looking for hospitality, good service, good food, the whole package. GoTab allows us to deliver,” he added.

More Table Turnover, Higher Food Sales

For Maketto, GoTab QR codes empower guests to order directly from their mobile phones through the spacious indoor and outdoor seating areas. For the staff, this means making different menus available at different times, along with specials and promotions. “We really love the flexibility of programming we get with GoTab,” said Director of Sales Keem Hughley. “Menus can be updated in real-time and the platform is very intuitive for our staff to use.” Using GoTab has allowed the team to speed up service and increase table turnover, particularly in the evenings. Dinner service now sees 3 different turns of table, and F&B sales have also increased significantly. “This past month (April 2021), we have reached the same sales volume levels as pre-pandemic times in 2019,” said Hughley. “And we’ve done this with 60% less FOH staff than in 2019,” he added.

"People are coming out more and getting more comfortable. They’re looking for hospitality, good service, good food, the whole package. GoTab allows us to deliver."

John Linck, Director of Operations Black Restaurant Group

Finding Success & Expansion Opportunities

An early adopter of GoTab’s contactless ordering and payment features, modern cantina Espita was able to find success during the pandemic. Using GoTab for dine-in, takeout and delivery, they implemented a hybrid service model that eliminated ordering and paying through a server, leading to a simplified dining experience and higher guest satisfaction. “Guests place the orders. The orders come out. It’s that simple. And guests love it,” said Destination Unknown Restaurants GM Josh Phillips. “We get compliments constantly. The amount of repeat business is outrageous at this point… At least five or six times a night I get people coming up to me after their meal and telling me how much of a better dining experience they’re having thanks to GoTab. We’ve also been able to shave off 30 minutes per table.” 

The pandemic didn’t stop Destination Unknown Restaurants’s expansion plans: new GoTab-centric concepts opened in 2020 and 2021, including Ghostburger - a ghost kitchen operation housed within Espita (for now) - and Las Gemelas, a fast casual Taqueria paired with the sit-down restaurant Cocina Mexicana. “With less staff needed to operate and serve guests at our restaurants, we have been able to open new concepts and curtail the current labor shortages,” said Las Gemelas General Manager Kelly Phillips.  Las Gemelas was the first restaurant to receive a grant from the Restaurant Revitalization Fund, providing them the opportunity to give some of the team raises, pay off some of the debt it took to open the restaurant, and further expand the outdoor offerings. “Without GoTab, we wouldn’t have been able to expand our businesses during the pandemic,” she added.

"This past month (April 2021), we have reached the same sales volume levels as pre-pandemic times in 2019. And we’ve done this with 60% less FOH staff than in 2019."

Keem Hughley, Director of Sales at Maketto

About GoTab, Inc.

GoTab, Inc., a Restaurant Commerce Platform (RCP), is helping large- and mid-sized restaurants, breweries, bars, hotels and other venues run lean, profitable operations while making guests even more satisfied. It integrates with popular point-of-sale (POS) systems and allows patrons to order and pay through a server, order and pay directly from their own mobile phones, or blend the two experiences all on one tab, through its easy-to-use mobile POS, contactless ordering and payment features, and kitchen management systems (KMS). The guest never has to download a mobile app or create a password. Operators get flexible features that can be rapidly applied to access new revenue streams via dine-in, take-out and delivery, ghost kitchens, retail groceries, and more. Founded in 2016, GoTab processes over $250M transactions per year with operations across 35 U.S. states and growing. For more information, consult our media kit, request a demo here or learn more at https://gotab.io/en.