Thirty years on the floor, then this.

I spent more than thirty years in this trade. Top hotel kitchens and restaurants, and years on cruise ships. Trained and certified in the craft, in the old way — where you learn a station properly before anyone lets you near the next one. I have worked and lived across four continents, which is a long way of saying I have seen the same job done in a dozen languages, with a dozen sets of habits, under a dozen sets of rules.

The conclusion I came away with is unglamorous: it is the same job everywhere, and it breaks in the same places. The phone that rings mid-service. The booking that never confirms. The stock that was counted on a Sunday by somebody guessing. The review answered three days late. Different country, different currency, identical evening.

I have also been on both sides of it. I know what the person carrying the plates is dealing with, and I know what the person paying the invoices is dealing with, and I know that those two people rarely have the same picture of the same night.

How this started

Nothing dramatic. I was building a website for a restaurant — Bistro Kaval, in Velike Brusnice, in Dolenjska — and somewhere in the middle of it I thought: why not build sites for others too. But the surroundings do their work on you. Sitting inside a restaurant's actual problems all day, the thinking drifts from the site to the evening the site is supposed to help with. The product grew out of that drift, not out of a business plan.

I have been around computers since the Commodore 64, so the technology side was never frightening — just something to be learned properly, the same as a station. What I could not have done twenty years ago is build any of this alone. That part is new, and it is the reason a cook can now ship software.

What Gostino actually is

It is the part of the team that stays behind after the last order — answering, booking, pricing, ordering and replying — so that the people who are physically there can do the part that needs a person. It is one system rather than six, because six systems that do not talk to each other is how most venues end up typing the same guest's name four times.

Gostino is small. Today that honestly means one person who knows the work, and a stack of systems built to do the parts that do not need a person. I mention it because it changes what you should expect: you will not be handed to an account manager, and nobody will read you a slide. You will talk to the person who built it.

Where it is being used

Bistro Kaval is the first venue running it end to end, and it is also where every idea gets tested before it goes anywhere near anyone else. If something on this site sounds like it was dreamed up at a desk, it probably was not — most of it exists because a specific evening went badly.

Where I am

Slovenia, working remotely, answering the same day, seven days a week. If you run a place and want to talk about where your week actually goes, that costs nothing and takes fifteen minutes.