Ask AI to write anything for your restaurant and watch what comes back. It will invent a happy hour you don't run. It will tell a guest about a dish you cut two years ago. It will hand you a lunch promotion for a store that doesn't open until four. All of it confident, all of it in complete sentences, all of it wrong in ways only you can catch.
The cause is the same every time. It knows how to write. It has never been told what you sell. You hired the smartest employee you will ever have access to and put them on the floor without a single shift of training. And every time you correct it in a chat window, the correction is forgotten when you close the tab. You are retraining the same person every morning and calling it a tool problem.
The fix is a file. It's called a skill.
What a skill actually is
A skill is a text file that Claude reads before it does a job.
That's the whole idea. A name at the top, a description of when to use it, and underneath that, whatever you'd tell a new hire. Write it once and it loads automatically, in every conversation, without you pasting anything.
Two mechanics separate this from a long prompt you keep in your notes app:
It loads itself. The description at the top is what your request gets matched against. Write "use before writing any review reply, ad, or email about the restaurant" and it fires on its own when you ask for a review reply. You never have to remember it exists.
It stays out of the way. Only the name and description sit in memory, about a hundred words. The body loads when it's needed. So you can build twenty of these and pay almost nothing for the nineteen you aren't using right now. Your GM doesn't recite the wine list while counting the drawer. Same principle.
Don't write it. Get interviewed.
Here's where most people stall out. They open a blank file, stare at it, decide they'll do it properly this weekend, and never do.
Skip that. You already know everything that goes in this file. Getting it out of your head is an interview, and the machine can run the interview.
Open a new chat and paste this:
I want to build a house facts skill for my restaurant so you stop
inventing details about my business.
Interview me. Ask me these, one small batch at a time, and wait for
my answers before moving on:
1. Locations, addresses, phone, website.
2. Hours per location. Ask separately about kitchen hours if they
differ from bar or dining room hours.
3. The current menu. Also what came off recently, so you never tell
a guest something is still available when it isn't.
4. Prices you'd quote publicly, and which prices move.
5. Happy hour and standing specials. Exact days, exact windows.
6. Policies: age, reservations, large parties, comps, discounts,
parking, dress code, pets, delivery.
7. Staff whose names guests use, and how guests misspell them.
8. Claims I can back publicly. Press, awards, ratings.
9. What people always get wrong about my place.
10. Words and phrases I refuse to use, and things I never want said
in public on our behalf.
In addition to these, are there any other questions you'd like to
ask me? Ask those too.
When we're done, write it as a SKILL.md file with name and
description fields in the frontmatter, and tell me where to save it.That last instruction is the one that earns its keep. Ask it what else it needs. It knows what it keeps guessing about. It will ask you things you would never have thought to write down, and those answers are usually the ones that stop the embarrassing mistakes.
Answer out loud with voice-to-text (use Whispr). Two minutes, and you're done talking.
As far as your employee handbook, onboarding packet, training doc, and the menu spec you send the printer: Upload the whole thing and tell it to build the file from that, then interview you only on what the document left out. It's already the skill. It just needs a header.
The header is the part to get right
Whatever it writes, check the top three lines:
---
name: "house-facts"
description: "Hours, menu, pricing, policies, and copy rules for
[your restaurant]. Use before writing any ad, social post, email,
or review reply about the business."
---That description is the single highest-leverage sentence in the file. It has to say what the file holds and when to reach for it. Vague description, and the file sits there unread while the machine goes back to guessing. This is where many first skills fail.
Then save it and test it sideways
On claude.ai, zip the folder and upload it under Settings, then Capabilities. In Claude Code, drop the folder in ~/.claude/skills/. In Cowork, ask Claude to save it for you.
To test, ask for the downstream job. A review reply, a social caption, an email to a group inquiry. Watch whether it pulls the file on its own. Asking "do you have my house facts" tells you nothing, because it'll find the file when you point straight at it. If it fails to fire on the real job, rewrite the description and test again.
Why you can't just download one
Fair question at this point: somebody has already built a restaurant skill, so why not install theirs?
They have. I went looking this week and found one offering menu engineering, food cost analysis, inventory forecasting, review responses, hiring posts, and staff training docs. One file, six jobs, free.
What a file like that holds is frameworks. How to think about menu margin. How to structure a reply to a bad review. That's real knowledge, competently written, and worth roughly what a decent book on the subject is worth.
What it cannot hold is your closing time. Your prices. Which of your locations runs a kitchen past eleven. The dish you pulled in March. The bartender whose name shows up in half your five-star reviews. A framework tells the machine how to think. Facts tell it what's true. Install the framework and you get a beautifully structured, sensory-rich description of a pizza you don't make.
The six-jobs-in-one-file part is its own problem. Remember that the description is what decides when a skill fires. A description broad enough to cover costing and hiring and menu copy is too vague to reliably trigger on any of them. Narrow files fire. Wide ones sit there.
Important note: Be very careful about all things customer-facing. I would not use an off-the-shelf voice for your review responses, e-mail list, outbound event inquiries, etc even if you do have your house facts skill in play.
Download the frameworks if you want them. The facts are the part nobody can write for you, and they're the part that stops the mistakes.
The corrections are the actual asset
The first version will probably be rough. That's fine, because the file is designed to grow.
From here on, every time it gets something wrong about your restaurant, you say "add that to the house facts file." One sentence. It edits itself.
Six weeks of that and you own something no competitor can copy, because it's built out of your specific screwups. The lunch promo it built for a store that opens at four becomes a line that says so. The dish it retired on your behalf becomes a rule that it never rules on menu availability without asking. Every warning in a mature house facts file is a mistake that already happened once and will not happen again.
That's the difference between a tool and a trained employee, and it's the reason to start with the boring file. Every AI pitch aimed at restaurants right now leads with the labor model and the invoice checker. Those are the wrong first build, and the people selling them know it. A labor model that's confident about the wrong closing time is worse than no labor model at all.
Train the person before you give them the section.
Every problem in a restaurant can be solved. Most of them stay unsolved because the answer lives in one person's head and gets re-explained forever. This is the first tool I've used that takes something out of my head and leaves it somewhere it keeps working after I stop paying attention to it.
Go run the interview. Paste the prompt, talk for two minutes, and let it write the file.
Next one: the shortcut. Your handbook, your training packets, and your checklists are already eight more skills, and turning them over produces the first honest audit of your written operation you've ever had.
From a restaurant owner/operator, 20+ years in.