This week, HNGRY hosted a live discussion on the fast-moving developments in the world of AI restaurant agents with two operator-builders who have been experimenting far ahead of the curve: Eli Feldman, owner/operator of Shy Bird in Boston and founder of Ask Colette, and Donnie McClanahan, a longtime multi-unit foodservice operator, Square AI champion, and founder of Table & Ledger, a restaurant AI consultancy.

The conversation centered on how agents can turn the fragmented restaurant stack into something closer to an “ambient manager” that can proactively make suggestions and changes to a restaurant’s operations. But that future depends on interoperability: open APIs, MCP servers, and access to the data locked inside today’s systems of record. So I probed a deeper question: will restaurant AI will be owned by incumbents, startups, or operators themselves?