Building a Modern Hospitality Business: How My Place Runs on GoTab's Open and Adaptable Platform

My Place is not a restaurant with technology added in later. It is a technology-driven hospitality concept designed to support a wide range of dining and guest experiences through one connected operation.

With 280 seats inside and 50-seats outside in Shrewsbury, Missouri -- an inner-ring suburb of downtown St. Louis -- founder Sunny Bhalla operates several service models at once. My Place includes a full-service dining room, a café, a 51-tap self-pour beer wall and an automated cocktail bar. The cocktail bar runs on Smart Bar USA, a system also used in casinos, resorts and cruise lines.

The venue also features a 64-foot projection wall that rotates through more than 50 videos, from schools of fish and sharks to jungle scenes and outer space. 

Bhalla calls the concept "a digital country club without a golf course."

Bhalla understands complex systems. Over the past four decades, he has built gas stations across California, developed multi-billion-dollar telecom and cable infrastructures that reached more than 60 countries, built a psychiatric practice alongside his physician wife, and launched call centers in the Philippines that scaled from zero to thousands of employees.

He spent five years planning for My Place Café, Bar & Restaurant, visited many countries, built partnerships and relationships with companies that deliver hospitality items to 100 plus countries and almost 100,000 items in portfolio and more than two years evaluating platforms before choosing a point-of-sale (POS) system.

The challenge was to find one platform that could support every part of the operation.

"Other systems would say, 'We'll do two or three pieces,' or 'We'll do 80 percent but not the whole 100 percent,'" Bhalla said. "I wanted a one-stop shop. I didn't want any other screen or anything."

While several factors influenced the decision, the Smart Bar integration played a significant role. Bhalla wanted the automated cocktail system to operate inside the same platform as the dining room, café, self-pour beer wall and kitchen -- without a separate screen or manual workaround. That integration became the test every POS provider had to pass. Most could not.

"When I talked to [a competitor], they said, 'Who are you? '" Bhalla explained. 

GoTab responded differently. When Bhalla raised the Smart Bar integration, the company's leadership moved quickly. The integration was live within about a month, roughly two years before My Place opened.

"GoTab’s CEO understood," Bhalla said. "Within four weeks to a month it was working and printing tickets."

That willingness to build around the operator's integration needs turned GoTab from a vendor into a technology partner.

"That," Bhalla said, "is the main reason I chose GoTab."

HOW GOTAB POWERS MY PLACE

• Enables beverage cost control across both bars. RFID-enabled self-pour wall serves beer by the ounce, while the Smart Bar integration meters liquor to 1/20 of a milliliter, capturing every pour and cutting shrinkage on the highest-margin categories.
• Runs a handheld POS-centric service model, with more than 90% of orders entered tableside. Servers stay on the floor instead of walking to a terminal, speeding order entry and improving table turns across a 330-seat footprint.
• Centralizes check management on a single open tab, with split payments and live tab transfers from the bar to the table. Guests move through the venue without reopening a check, and servers settle large parties without manual workarounds.
• Coordinates the kitchen through station-level kitchen display systems at the grill, fryer and pizza line, backed by an expo printer that keeps tickets sequenced and accurate when volume spikes.

THE MY PLACE STORY & HISTORY

My Place Cafe, Bar & Restaurant began with a sweeping idea: bring the world under one roof. 

"The world is my place," Bhalla shared with a smile. "We've got cuisines, staff and technology from around the world."

It is the kind of vision most people would file away as a daydream. Bhalla spent five years turning it into a building. Two of those years he spent traveling back and forth to China, walking factory floors, meeting the people who made and managed the goods, and building supplier relationships one handshake at a time. He came home with close to 200 items for the space, every one of them chosen the way he had approached his entire career, in person and at the source.

The kitchen is as global as the journey that built it. Bhalla's executive head chef is from France. His team come from Burma, India, Romania, Syria, France, Bolivia, Cuba, Mexico, Honduras, Canada and the United States, working shoulder to shoulder. The menu has dishes from around the world and is the heartbeat of the operation. 

"Our menu brings people in, and they are amazed," he said.

The amazement is earned. Bhalla came to hospitality after decades in the corporate world and has eaten in some of the most expensive dining rooms in the world. He measures My Place against them without flinching. His own six-course wine pairing dinner runs about $135 before tax and tip. A recent comparable-level three-course meal for two at a well-known luxury hotel cost him roughly $500.

"I'll say my menu is 100 times better, and we're very economical," he said.

Bhalla, who has built telecom networks across continents and companies from nothing, sees no mystery in any of it.

"I just put all my experience and common sense together to do this," he said.

A PARTNER, NOT JUST A PLATFORM

Bhalla did not find GoTab through a sales pitch. He found the company the way he has built every venture, by showing up.

He attended the National Restaurant Association Show for years while planning My Place. Along the way, he met representatives from GoTab. 

"If you want to do anything in America, start attending the conferences and building relationships with the vendors," Bhalla said. "Then just put your pieces together to do it. That's what I did."

When it came time to complete the buildout, the technology was only half the equation. Bhalla was uniting systems he had never run before on a platform he was learning from scratch, and he is the first to admit there was a learning curve.

That is where GoTab's people came in. Bhalla credits two in particular: Hannah, a GoTab Partner Manager, who was his first point of contact, and Chanel, a Customer Success Manager who has guided him through the rollout and answered every question along the way.

"She did an amazing job supporting my questions," Bhalla said of Chanel. 

The patience mattered, because Bhalla's concept asked more of the platform than most. Bringing a full-service dining room, a café, a self-pour beer wall and an automated cocktail bar together under one system took real work, and GoTab kept showing up to do it.

What began on a trade show floor became the kind of relationship Bhalla prizes most: a vendor that behaves like a partner.

SPEED ON TAP

At most restaurants, a beer is a small act of patience. A guest sits, waits for a server, places an order, then waits again while it travels to the bar and back. Bhalla clocks that round trip at 15 to 20 minutes, and he designed it out of My Place.

His self-pour beer wall puts more than 50 taps directly in guests' hands. They check in with a credit card and ID, receive an RFID card, and pour what they want, when they want it, charged by the ounce.

"Within a second, the beer is available to them," Bhalla said.

The wall does more than please guests. It also solves a labor problem.

"I don't need to worry much about the labor on that," Bhalla explained. 

The same thinking runs through the rest of the venue. Bhalla's cocktails pour from that Smart Bar USA system, with recipes loaded into a database and orders routed straight from a GoTab handheld.

"You don't need bartending expertise," Bhalla said. "The key is following the drink recipes and procedures correctly."

The payoff runs in two directions at once. Every ounce is measured and every pour is captured, tightening control over both beer and liquor, down to 1/20 of a milliliter on the cocktail side. At the same time, the venue moves faster and runs leaner. 

Self-pour is the only self-serve corner of My Place. Everything else is full hospitality, just without the wait.

On the café side, a Swiss coffee machine handles hot and cold specialty drinks at the push of a button. A new drink is a new recipe in the system, not a new training session.

"I don't need to train staff on it," Bhalla explained.

BUILT FOR THE BUSIEST DAYS

My Place runs a steady 70 to 200-plus guests on a typical day, but the holidays are where the system earns its keep. Bhalla served more than 300 guests at his Mother's Day brunch and just under 300 on Easter, moving food, drinks and payments across all three spaces without the operation buckling. 

That headroom is exactly what Bhalla is counting on, because he is nowhere near finished.

"This year, the plan is to bring entertainment from around the world," Bhalla said.

He is in talks with Latin, Italian, Spanish, Mediterranean and Indian artists to match the global reach of the menu. 

Bhalla is also developing a line of “MP” branded merchandise, from tableware to glassware, so guests can carry a piece of My Place home.

"This is a brand that I'm building," Bhalla said.

He spent years getting the foundation right. Now he intends to build on it the same way he has built everything else -- one deliberate piece at a time.

"The goal is to grow this," Bhalla said. 

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Venue: My Place; Shrewsbury, Missouri, in the St. Louis area
Opened: Oct. 23, 2025 

Founder: Sandeep “Sunny” Bhalla 

Concept: A global hospitality destination bringing cuisine, goods and technology from around the world under one roof, combining full-service dining, a café, a self-pour beer wall and an automated cocktail bar Capacity: 330 guests across three distinct spaces. A gigantic u-shaped bar topped in quartz anchors the space. Beyond the bar is a 220-seat main dining room, where a perimeter wall doubles as a projection screen, capable of running four programs at the same time. Just inside the front entrance, down three stairs to the left is a 60-seat cafe that offers a calm atmosphere. 

GoTab Tools Used

• GoTab POS, running the café, full-service dining room, self-pour beer wall and automated cocktail bar on a single platform.
• Handhelds powering a handheld-first service model, with more than 90% of orders entered tableside.
• POS stations at the café counter and host stand for walk-ins and takeout.
• Smart Bar integration, routing cocktail orders from the handheld to the automated bar and metering liquor to 1/20 of a milliliter.
• RFID-enabled self-pour beer wall, charging guests by the ounce.
• Franke 1000 Swiss specialty-coffee machine integration on the café side.
• Station-level kitchen display systems at the grill, fryer and pizza line.
• Expo printer that keeps tickets sequenced and accurate when volume spikes.
• Single open tab with split payments and live tab transfers from the bar to the table.
• Website-integrated online ordering and takeout.

Why it works: GoTab allows My Place to run four distinct service models on one platform, giving an ambitious global concept the speed, labor efficiency and beverage control it needs while keeping the guest experience seamless across the entire venue.

Interested in building a multi-format hospitality concept like My Place? Learn how GoTab supports full-service, self-serve and distinctive guest experiences on a single platform at GoTab.com. Request a demo or contact the team to see what GoTab can do for your vision.