BONNIE EST DÉSORMAIS DISPONIBLE SUR WHATSAPP
Since 2019, Café Nieuw Amsterdam has served lunch, drinks, and dinner from inside the monumental West-Indisch Huis, a quiet garden tucked just off one of Amsterdam's busiest streets
Café Nieuw Amsterdam sits inside the monumental West-Indisch Huis, just off the busy Haarlemmerstraat, an all-day restaurant built around a garden that feels like a pause from the street outside. The kitchen keeps the menu short and seasonal rather than endless, and the wine list runs from familiar classics to bottles meant for guests who want to try something new.
Guido, Sales & Event Manager, also handles incoming requests for private dining and events hosted in the wider West-Indisch Huis venue, a business with its own busy calendar of weddings and corporate gatherings running alongside the restaurant.
On a full Friday or Saturday night, that meant one phone, ringing on the floor, competing directly with the guests already at the table. “It’s like every crowded restaurant,” Guido says. “A big challenge. It was stressful, really.” Simple questions, whether a dog was welcome, a change of time, an adjustment to a party size, took up as much staff attention as the complicated ones, and event enquiries specifically had no one dedicated to answer them properly during service.
Bringing Bonnie into contact with guests wasn't easy
Café Nieuw Amsterdam had real doubts before starting. Handing first contact with a guest to an AI assistant, in an industry built on hospitality, is not a small decision. Guido describes it as change management: training the team, staying enthusiastic, being honest that some people are reluctant, or even frightened, when a new tool touches something that central to the business.
One partner’s early reaction, in Guido’s words: “At the beginning we were terrified. It might completely fail, and our customers might hate it.”
It took a few weeks to go live, longer than a simple setup, because the team wanted every exception specific to their business checked before switching over. Bonnie is now connected to Guestplan and Gmail, and handles the full range of what comes in by phone.
Le moment où j'ai compris
Friday night, wine to pour, tables to seat, plates to run, and the phone was ringing: opening hours, whether the dog is welcome, a six that’s now an eight. Every one of those takes someone off the floor. Six months later, on exactly that kind of night, nobody noticed the phone at all. After service, Guido got a message from the team who’d worked it:
"Where was the phone? I only had to focus on the guests in front of me."
Guido Mopman
Sales & Events Manager | Bandra Horeca
Reservations for the coming days kept arriving on their own. The team, in his words, was blown away, and noticeably more relaxed, more present in the room.
That calm has become the baseline rather than the exception. Elsewhere in the business, the team has stopped noticing Bonnie is there at all, which Café Nieuw Amsterdam takes as evidence it’s working, not a reason for concern.
Asked what he’d say to someone skeptical about AI specifically, he doesn’t dismiss the doubt, but says that they should just go for it.
"It is new, so I understand the hesitation. However, it keeps the focus where it should be: on the guests, and that is how the business grows."
Guido Mopman
Sales & Events Manager | Bandra Horeca
