What sofra collects

The question itself, the waiter’s reply (the waiter only ever speaks from the restaurant’s own menu and notes), the language it was written in, whether the waiter could answer it, which dishes it suggested, and the time. Each visit gets a random session number so a restaurant can tell one conversation from another; it is not linked to a person and it disappears when the browser tab closes.

That record belongs to the restaurant whose menu was scanned. They see it in their dashboard so they can answer what their guests actually ask.

No name, no account, no payment details, and — unless you explicitly opt in below — no email address or phone number. The waiter never needs to know who you are to answer. We do not use tracking cookies and we do not run advertising or analytics trackers on the menu page.

If a guest volunteers something personal inside a question, it is stored as part of that question — so the honest advice is the same as with any waiter: tell it what you need it to know, not more.

After you mention an allergy or a diet, the waiter may offer to remember it. This is opt-in, twice over: nothing happens unless you give an email address or phone number AND enter the one-time code we send to it. The address goes to our identity service only to deliver that code and to recognise you next time; your saved preferences (for example “no nuts, vegetarian”) are stored against a random guest number.

Decline the offer and nothing is saved — the waiter works exactly the same. To be forgotten, use the button at the bottom of this page: it works immediately, with or without an account.

To write an answer, the question and the restaurant’s own menu and notes are sent to the AI model that answers it — Anthropic’s Claude or OpenAI, depending on the restaurant — which generates the reply and does not keep it to train models. Our servers and database run on Railway; the website runs on Vercel. Restaurant owners sign in through our identity service. That is the entire list.

Nothing you type trains an AI model, ours or anyone else’s. sofra does not build one: we send your question to a model, it answers, and the answer comes back. When a reply is wrong and someone flags it, we may write a test case from what went wrong — rewritten by hand as an example, never a copy of your conversation.

Questions and answers are kept for 18 months, then automatically stripped of everything that points to a person: the words go, and only an anonymous count of how many questions were asked that month survives, so a restaurant keeps its own history. Searches on the “what do you feel like eating” page are deleted after 6 months.

Saved dietary preferences stay until you delete them or ask to be forgotten — they exist only to save you repeating yourself.

You can do it yourself, right here, and it happens immediately — no account required and no email to wait on. Your questions, the replies and any saved dietary preferences are erased; the restaurant keeps only an anonymous count of how many questions were asked, with nothing that points to you.

A restaurant leaving sofra can have its whole record removed, guest questions included — write to hello@sofrahq.com.

You decide what the waiter knows: it answers only from the menu and notes you give it. Your menu page is public by design — anyone with the link or the QR can open it — but your traffic, your costs and your plan are never shown to anyone but you, and your restaurant only appears in our public directory if you switch it on yourself.