Background: BelAir Cantina is a Mexican-fusion restaurant best described as “Oaxacan meets L.A. food truck” style cuisine, served in a lively, California-style cantina.
Situation: BelAir Cantina’s online ordering system didn’t support throttling (the ability to proactively set limits to orders), causing them to get slammed on busy days – particularly on Cinco de Mayo when they execute an extraordinary amount of to-go orders. On that day in 2019, approximately 65-70% of incoming orders went unfulfilled, and they spent an entire month contacting customers and processing refunds.
They also needed an effective way to communicate with guests that didn’t require the adoption of an additional vendor.
The Bel-Air team spent 2 months evaluating providers that integrated with their POS system and were focused on two main priorities:
- Ease of use for guests, management, and hourly employees
- The ability to quickly and easily throttle orders
Solution: OneDine stood out because of its breadth of offerings. Although the brand didn’t plan on implementing the ability for guests to browse the menu, order, and/or pay at the table, they acknowledged that there were a lot of unknowns for restaurant brands coming out of the pandemic. Without knowing whether their guests would place a high value on a full-service dining experience or would prefer a more contactless and streamlined journey, they liked the flexibility that OneDine offered. The suite of products met their immediate criteria AND offered options to add services as they learned how COVID would affect both the industry and the brand.
“Out of ANY contracted service I’ve used since working in the restaurant industry, I’ve never had such an amazing rollout, training, implementation, and support experience as I did with OneDine. The sincerity and genuine care the OneDine team has even comes through in their emails – I can’t explain it!”
Jack Woznick, Director of Training & Development
Results: The platform was launched at all locations prior to May 5th, and their Cinco de Mayo operations couldn’t have run more smoothly. Not only did they execute the maximum volume of online orders they could handle without having to issue any refunds, but their dine-in operations were optimized as well, as they turned tables more efficiently since guests weren’t waiting for their food from an over-capacity kitchen. “Ask any of our managers, and they’ll tell you that Cinco de Mayo went better this year because of OneDine,” said Woznick.
Next up for BelAir Cantina is testing OneDine’s pay-at-the-table feature to see how it’s embraced by their guests, which currently represent a diverse demographic when it comes to adopting technology. Any success they see there would be icing on the cake as far as Woznick is concerned, and they’re happy to have a product that allows them the flexibility to meet their guests where they are.
