Explaining the menu
The same twenty descriptions, all night, in whichever language the table speaks. The menu can carry this on its own.
Territory: staffing
You cannot hire your way out of this season. You can lighten the shift.
Restaurants across Malta and Gozo are trimming opening hours, closing midweek and capping covers because the floor cannot be staffed. Nothing on this page fixes recruitment. What it does is take the repeatable half of front-of-house work off your people, so a team of three can run a room built for five without the service falling apart.
- No new hire, no new till
- Works in thirty languages
- Live in an afternoon
Where the hours go
Four jobs a short-staffed floor keeps repeating
Answering allergen questions
Written per-dish allergen flags give the guest a reliable answer without pulling someone off the pass.
Chasing sold-out dishes
One tap marks a dish sold out and every phone in the room updates, instead of a waiter apologising table by table.
Briefing new starters
Seasonal hires lean on the menu rather than on the one experienced server everyone is already queuing for.
The honest maths
A waiter you do not have to hire, and could not have hired anyway
EUR 39.90
per month
Unlimited guest questions to the table assistant on your published menu.
10
languages
English, Maltese, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Romanian, Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, Greek, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Turkish, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
0
recruitment weeks
No advert, no accommodation, no three-month training curve, no turnover in October.
Questions
Staffing questions
- How bad is the restaurant staffing situation in Malta?
- Hospitality bodies including the Association of Catering Establishments have repeatedly flagged severe shortages, with members reducing opening hours, closing on quieter days or capping covers because they cannot staff a full room. Recruitment lead times and accommodation costs make a fast fix unrealistic.
- Can technology really substitute for a front-of-house hire?
- Not for pouring wine or reading a table. It can absorb the repetitive part: describing dishes, translating, listing allergens and answering the same questions all evening. That is where a short-staffed team loses the most time.
- Does this mean going fully self-service?
- No. Qarta is a menu, not a kiosk. Guests browse and ask questions on their own phone, then order with your staff exactly as before. Nothing about your service model has to change.
- How quickly can we be live?
- Photograph your existing printed menus, the system transcribes them, you confirm prices and allergens, and you publish. Most venues get through it in an afternoon rather than a project.
- What does it cost compared with a hire?
- EUR 39.90 per month plus a EUR 149 setup that includes printed QR stickers and staff training. A single additional multilingual server in Malta costs several times that per month, before recruitment and turnover.
Cover the shift you cannot staff
EUR 39.90 per month plus EUR 149 setup with printed QR stickers and staff training.