MultiDine Is Making Your Dining Experience High-Tech

If you’ve ever wondered how your restaurant and ordering experience could be better enhanced by technology, then MultiDine may be the answer.  MultiDine is taking the restaurant experience and turning it high-tech, but not in an impersonal way.

MultiDine is a servicing platform that lets you interact through touch and can actually learn what you like so you can find your preferred dishes at a restaurants.

Idan Dadon, MultiDine CEO and founder, came up with MultiDine after working his way through a number of restaurant jobs.

“I worked in every possible job in a restaurant, and then I came up with MultiDine,” Dadon said.  “I realized the big problem with restaurants is that it’s a business where all they do is serve customers and they know the least about them, so with all that’s available today, it’s possible.”

MultiDine works through either an app or an actual touch screen surface that is part of the restaurant table.  If you want to use MultiDine and aren’t sitting at one of the “surface” tables, you can scan the QR code on the table with your iPhone and use the MultiDine app.  Once the MultiDine app is launched, you can search the menu for particular ingredients, view the menu in different languages and order from the app.  Dadon said that MultiDine can learn your preferences over time and recommend specific dishes for you.

If you are sitting at one of the surface tables, you can use the touch screen to search for ingredients, share pictures of dishes with other at the table, and even play games to pass time while you wait for your food.  But Dadon stresses, MultiDine is there to enhance the customer experience, not to eliminate waiters.

“We’re not aiming to remove waiters, we’re just saying, let the waiter focus on what he’s supposed to do, which is actually host and interact with the customer and take all the ordering part- which is 30% of the waiters time- and let the surface or the app do it because then the waiter can be more focused or making sure the customer is satisfied.”

Dadon said that he has been thinking about the concept for almost ten years but only recently was able to offer a surface-type computer for restaurants that was reasonably priced and sturdy.   The design, which Dadon built, has come down in price from an initial $10,000 per table to $3,000.

“It’s a design that has to fit to restaurant use, because it needs to be durable for heat, for water, for weight, you’re putting ceramic plates on it so it has to be scratch proof,  it should be very durable, and this design itself was in the restaurant for five months and it worked great.” Dadon said.

But for restaurants that don’t want to invest in a $3,000 computer surface for one of their tables, they have the option to use the MultiDine app.

“We made an app that communicates with the table, that synchronizes with the table so everything is on the cloud,” Dadon said.

MultiDine users can also sign in through Facebook and share their dishes with friends on the Facebook platform.  It also enables restaurants to up-sell other items to customers, such as wine to pair with a particular dish.

Dadon said that the surface table is aimed at casual restaurants such as TGI Friday’s and Applebees, and less toward fine dining.  Dadon said he is still in the capital raising phase but has ” several restaurant’s interested.”  He is hoping to have a beta site in New York City by August…stay tuned!