English
Hi GoTabbers!
At the end of September, GoTab hit a big one: our 10th year in operation. Ten years! We’re still a little amazed, and mostly just grateful to every operator, partner, and teammate who has built this with us.
What we love most about where we are at ten is how complicated the problems you bring us have gotten. A winery with two locations and five revenue streams. A venue where the phone won’t stop ringing during opening week. A manager who needs a new service point up on the patio right now, with no new hardware. None of those fit in a simple box, and we get to support them with our own products and features plus a growing list of integrations.
That’s what we’re excited about in this issue. You’ll meet The Blind Horse, see how TastyVox sends phone orders straight into GoTab, and get the details on Tap to Pay on iPhone, which is live now. Dig in!
Patricia Mejia, GoTab CMO 🍷
At The Blind Horse Restaurant & Winery in Kohler and Cedarburg, Wisconsin, guests don’t experience the business in neat categories. They might start with a tasting, order an appetizer, and follow the live music to the terrace for dinner. That freedom is part of the appeal. It is also what makes the operation hard to run on a conventional restaurant system.
Before GoTab, the team was juggling three separate point-of-sale systems. A wine-sales platform couldn’t handle coursed fine dining, so another system was added, and then another for the second location. “We tried to go strictly to OrderPort for all locations, but it was not capable of handling the fine-dining side. Then we added another restaurant system and another instance for Cedarburg. We went from having two point-of-sale systems to having three,” said Jason Bagan, sous chef at The Blind Horse.
With more than 20 years in IT behind him, Bagan skipped the button-layout comparisons and went straight to architecture: how a platform handles separate revenue centers, how easily data moves, and how good the API documentation is. GoTab’s shareable tabs caught his attention first. Then he looked at Fishbowl by GoTab and opsi by GoTab. Today the team runs GoTab POS and handhelds, uses opsi for AI-assisted invoice processing and inventory, and plans to use Fishbowl for wine club communications and guest analytics.
About 90 to 120 days into the rollout, speed of support was a standout. “Here, we can bring up a problem or something we need and hear, ‘Yes, that is fixable.’ Then 10 minutes later, it is done,” Bagan said.
Phone orders are still a habit for a lot of guests, and the phone still rings at the worst possible moment: mid-rush, with every hand on the floor. TastyVox is a hospitality-first voice AI that answers calls 24/7, takes complete orders and modifiers, and sends them straight into GoTab.
One mutual customer, a growing venue with food, drinks, and entertainment under new ownership, launched TastyVox on day one rather than staffing a dedicated phone answerer. Demand was several times the old location’s best day. Phone orders show up in GoTab and on the kitchen display, labeled so the team can tell them apart from online and walk-in orders, and the assistant reads every order back before it’s submitted.
Phone orders arrive in GoTab like any other order, with no re-keying and no missed calls.
GoTab already lets guests open and pay their own tabs from their phones. Tap to Pay on iPhone, now live in the GoTab POS app, gives the staff side the same simplicity. Servers and bartenders can take an order and accept contactless payment on the same iPhone, with no card reader, dongle, or terminal.
“A manager can now stand up a new service point in the time it takes to unlock an iPhone; i.e., a pop-up bar, a patio, a festival gate, without buying new hardware or waiting for a new one to be delivered,” said Tim McLaughlin, CEO and co-founder of GoTab.
The Blind Horse didn’t set out to replace hospitality with technology. It chose tools that fit how its business actually works. TastyVox and Tap to Pay on iPhone are built on the same idea: meet your team where they already are.
Thank you for being part of the GoTab community.