Can a restaurant or pub use ChatGPT for menus, review replies and rotas? Plan prices, data terms and the one job to keep

Yes. A restaurant or pub can use ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot or Gemini to draft menu descriptions, review replies and a first rota. The business plans, which do not train on your content by default, cost £5.90 to £22.50 a person a month. Allergen information is the one job to keep, because the law requires it to be accurate and a chatbot has never seen your supplier's label.

What this is, and is not. A desk check of each vendor's own pricing and data pages, read in a browser on 1 October 2026. We did not test the four against each other and we do not rank them. Prices and terms change, so read the live page before you pay.

What each plan costs, and what it does with your words

Claude's page first loads with US dollar prices and swaps to its UK version once it finishes loading. The UK version showed Team at £18 a seat a month billed annually or £22.50 billed monthly, and Pro at £18 a month or £180 for a year paid up front, all including 20% VAT. ChatGPT's page did not say whether VAT is included. Workspace Starter puts Gemini in Gmail and the Gemini app, and Standard adds Docs and Meet.

For an owner and one manager the sums are:

The Copilot figure sits on top of the Microsoft 365 plan the venue already pays for. The Workspace figure buys the email and documents as well as Gemini. The rows do not buy the same thing.

The personal plans are different

The cheaper route is one personal subscription: ChatGPT Plus at £20 a month, or Claude Pro at £18. The data terms change with it. OpenAI's help page says content from its services for individuals may be used to train its models unless you switch that off under Settings, Data controls. Anthropic's privacy page says chats on its Free, Pro and Max plans are used to improve its models if you choose to allow it. On either personal plan, open the privacy settings before the first prompt and read what is switched on.

Whichever plan you use, leave out what the tool does not need: guests' names and phone numbers, staff names beside pay or sickness, and anything about a named guest's allergy or health.

Three prompts that work

Menu descriptions. "Write a menu description of 20 to 25 words for each dish below. Use only the ingredients I list. Do not add any allergen, dietary or 'free from' claim. Plain words, no superlatives."

A review reply. "Draft a reply under 120 words to this three-star review. Thank the guest, name the specific point, say what we changed and invite them to phone the manager. Do not offer a discount or a free meal." The last line matters, and our review reply writer explains the ban on incentivised reviews behind it.

A first rota. "Here are next week's bookings by day and each person's availability, with initials in place of names. Draft a rota. List every gap of under 11 hours between two shifts and every shift over 6 hours with no 20-minute break." Then run the five checks in our pub and bar staff rota template yourself.

The job to keep: allergen information

Do not ask a chatbot which of the 14 allergens are in a dish. The Food Standards Agency's best practice guidance for non-prepacked food says the allergen information given to customers must be accurate, and calls that a legal requirement. Its guidance for food businesses says how to get there: record allergen ingredients in writing from product specification sheets and ingredient labels, keep the record up to date, and consider the effect when a recipe changes.

A chatbot can do none of that. It has not read the label on the stock, the sauce or the bread you bought this week. It answers from what a dish of that name usually contains, and a usual recipe is not your recipe.

There is one narrow job it can do. Give it your own checked allergen matrix and ask it to lay the table out for print, or to turn each row into a "Contains" line for the menu. A named person then checks every line against the matrix before a customer sees it.

What the regulators have published

The Information Commissioner's Office has guidance on AI and data protection. It applies the UK GDPR principles to AI systems and is written for organisations in every sector. We found nothing there written for restaurants or pubs, and no Food Standards Agency page on using AI tools for menu or allergen work. The general rule above applies: the information must be accurate, whoever or whatever drafted it. The Agency's guidance covers England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

How to start this week

1. Pick the tool that sits with the email you already use.
2. Buy the business plan, or check the training setting on a personal one.
3. Write a one-page rule for staff: what may be pasted in, what may not, and who checks the result.

Where Overlyft fits

Overlyft is an agency, not one of the four products above. It can set up an AI assistant that drafts a venue's review replies and next week's rota. The owner posts the reply and the manager publishes the rota.