Definition
Front of house
Front of house (FOH) is everything the guest sees and interacts with: the dining room, bar, host stand, and the servers, bartenders, and hosts who run it.
Front of house, or FOH, is the guest-facing half of the restaurant: the dining room, the bar, the host stand, the phone, and the people who work them (hosts, servers, bartenders, runners). It is the counterpart to the Back of house, the kitchen and prep side. FOH is where hospitality actually happens and where most of a guest's impression is formed, from how fast the phone gets answered to how the check average grows through a good server's suggestions.
The FOH is also where indie restaurants leak the most recoverable revenue, because it depends on a human being available at the exact moment a guest reaches out, and during a rush that human is busy. Roughly 40% unanswered / $20B lost annually, costing the industry an estimated tens of billions a year in bookings and orders that simply never connected. Every unanswered call is a reservation, a large takeout order, or a catering inquiry that went to the restaurant down the street.
AI is reshaping the FOH not by replacing the warmth on the floor but by covering the moments no person can: a voice agent answers every call and books the table 24/7, reservation and messaging systems handle confirmations and reminders, and review tools make sure the impression a guest leaves gets a reply (replying to reviews correlates with +35% revenue). See AI phone answering and AI reservations.
Related terms
Your next service / Ready when you are
Less busywork. A better next shift.
Turn what you have learned into a focused brief. Start with the job that matters most, and keep the tools that already work for your restaurant.
Describe it. Review it. Keep improving it. Check connections and costs before going live.