Say you have just sat down at Loft Pub, scanned the QR code on the table and tapped EN. One dish says "Only 3 portions left". Open the menu again a little later and it may say 2, though nobody has touched it: for dishes linked to our till, the count drops by itself each time a portion is rung up.
That badge comes from the back office we run with AI, and that back office shapes more of your visit than you might think: what you can order, and what goes on the menu next.
Reading the menu in English
The QR code opens the menu in Romanian, Russian or English. Each language has its own pages, and we keep every dish name and description in all three. Search narrows the list as you type. You can filter by new, promo, spicy, no alcohol or under 150 lei, and two allergen filters leave out dishes with dairy or shellfish. Tap a dish for its ingredients, allergens, portion size, calories and spice level. The allergen lists are a guide, so please tell your waiter about any allergy.
Prices, dishes we have taken off the menu and those portion counters are set in our admin panel and reach the menu within a minute. On 14 October 2026, 17 of these changes were live. So a dish we have run out of should disappear before you set your heart on it.
Ordering from home, booking a table
There is no delivery platform between you and our kitchen. Order on our website between 13:00 and 21:00 and it lands in our Telegram chat; someone calls you to confirm, and one of our couriers brings it. You pay at the door, cash or card. In mid-October 2026 online payment had not been built yet, and the website said so. Prices are checked again as soon as your order comes in, and a dish we have taken off the menu cannot be ordered.
For a table, call us, or write on WhatsApp or Telegram. Online booking was switched off on 15 September 2026 after fake bookings, and on 14 October 2026 every booking still went through a person.
Cameras, and tables that go quiet
What do the cameras in the pub look for? Occupied tables, counted in five areas. From 11:00 to midnight, if an area shows more occupied tables than open bills on our till for three minutes, our staff Telegram group gets one photo of that area so someone can go and look. The count is per area, so it cannot tell which table is missing a bill. As for privacy: the system identifies nobody, the AI gets the counts and never an image, faces in the alert photo are blurred automatically (the system itself warns that the blur is not guaranteed), and alert photos are kept on the server for up to 14 days.
Our till reports each table as it opens and closes. If your table has ordered nothing new for half an hour (a quarter of an hour if there is beer on it), your waiter gets a private reminder on Telegram to come over, and another every 20 minutes. By 13 October 2026 those reminders had gone out 11,038 times. The catch: a reminder only reaches a waiter who has linked their Telegram, and on that date most of ours had not, so it covered only part of the floor. Two more alerts, one for beer tables after 12 minutes with nothing added and one for bills left open too long, were still in test on 14 October 2026 and sent nothing.
Your orders are the brief for the next dish
Every order you place is also a vote. The owner can ask the AI for new dishes built on what already sells, using only ingredients we already buy. In one answer, on 27 September 2026, it started from the 30-day best sellers: our house zeama, a chicken soup, at 115 portions, and the pork and chicken skewers at 98 each. Its first suggestion was a shrimp quesadilla. That stays a suggestion until the chef has checked the grams and we decide to cook it.
At 04:50 each night the system recalculates what every dish and drink costs us, at the prices we actually paid, VAT included. So once we start paying more for an ingredient, the next morning's report already reflects it in every dish that uses it. The AI can suggest recipe changes, but none goes through until the owner signs it off with his PIN: nothing on your plate changes without a person deciding.
"Did you have to replace your till?"
For anyone weighing this up for their own venue: no. Our till and iiko, our accounting and stock system, both stayed. The back office reads them, and writes into iiko only through steps a person approves.
What changed is the paperwork. A supplier invoice no longer has to be typed in: a phone photo posted in a staff Telegram group, or uploaded on the dashboard, is enough (162 had come in through the group by 14 October 2026). AI agents read it line by line, and it goes into iiko once one of us approves it. The system also suggests each week's order quantities, but we place the orders ourselves: by that date the AI had not created a single one.
For how all this is measured and run, the SharpLean team, who built our back office and look after it, keep a case file on Loft Pub.
Loft Pub & Kitchen has been open on two floors at Decebal 20, in Botanica, Chișinău, since September 2025. If a dish description in English reads oddly, tell your waiter: we can fix it ourselves, and the corrected text goes live with our next website update.