The restaurant integration nobody planned for
Projects stumble on the boring connections: booking, EPOS, the live menu, the QR that still points at a PDF. Plan those before the hero image.
Restaurant projects rarely die on the hero. They stumble on handoffs. The booking widget that does not receive covers. The menu that is live on web and stale on QR. The EPOS that was going to sync later.
These fail because they are discussed late. Someone says the platform has an API and everyone nods like that is a plan.
Map them with the same seriousness as the homepage. What moves. How often. Who gets the alert. What the diner sees when Quiteful or OpenTable is down.
Proof the exact operations with real credentials. Ten test dishes is not a Saturday night menu. A sandbox booking is not a party of eight.
Good integration work is operational. Monitoring, retries, fallbacks. The code is often easy. Knowing what happens when it fails keeps launches calm.
Common questions
- Which integrations should be mapped first?
- Booking, menu, email, analytics, and anything that must match in-room — QR, signage, hours.
- What does a real integration plan include?
- What data moves, how often, who owns failures, what diners see when it breaks, auth, sandbox limits.