Restaurant software for bars and cocktail-led restaurants
Sturgeon helps bars and bar-led restaurants run the parts that decide the margin: labor against sales, tips and payroll, staff certification, and the reviews that name a night. It reads from the POS and scheduling tools you already use.
Where the day goes wrong
Peaks that outrun the schedule
A bar's sales arrive in a few hours, and the labor has to be there for them. Too thin and service suffers; too heavy and the night loses money.
Tips, splits, and the paperwork after close
Pooling tips by the house rules and splitting them to the minute is slow by hand, and every typed number is a place to be wrong.
Cards that expire and staff who are not cleared
Food-handler and alcohol cards expire on their own dates, and it is easy to schedule a shift that nobody on it is certified for.
What Sturgeon does about it
- AI consultantAn AI consultant for your restaurant, not a chatbotAsk Stu what to schedule against the forecast, who is heading into overtime, and which vendor is creeping on price. He answers from your own sales, schedules, and invoices.
- Recipes & inventoryRestaurant recipe costing with inventory that deducts itselfBatched syrups, house infusions, and prep recipes are recipes too: real measures, any yield, converted between units, and costed from your latest invoice.
- Review managementRestaurant review management that knows who wrote the reviewA brutal anonymous review matched to the night, the check, and the server, with a reply drafted and a recovery suggested for your approval.
- MarketingRestaurant marketing attributed to covers and revenueAudiences built from what guests ordered and when they stopped coming, SMS win-back campaigns, and results counted in covers seated and revenue banked.
- Equipment monitoringRestaurant equipment monitoring that books its own repairWalk-in temperatures and equipment watched while it still works, with the vendor booked around your prep when something drifts.
The platform also covers tips pooled by your rules and split to the minute from the punches, and training that tracks every food-handler and alcohol card to its expiry.
Worth reading
- GuidesRestaurant labor cost percentage: formula, benchmarks, and how to lower itThe formula, what to include, sales per labor hour, and where labor leaks.
- GuidesWhat is prime cost in a restaurant, and how do you calculate it?Cost of goods sold plus labor, why operators watch it weekly, and how to read it.
Questions
Does Sturgeon track alcohol certification?
Yes. Training, in the Full stack plan, tracks every food-handler and alcohol card to its expiry, and the schedule refuses a shift nobody on it is certified for.
Can Sturgeon pool and split tips?
Yes. The night's tips are pooled by your rules, split to the minute from the punches, and exported to payroll with nobody typing a number. It is part of the Full stack plan.
Can Sturgeon cost batched cocktails and house syrups?
Yes, because a batch is a recipe. Sturgeon keeps recipes with real quantities, scales any yield, converts units, and costs each ingredient from your latest invoice in MarginEdge, so a batch is costed the same way a dish is.
Does it work with my POS and scheduling?
Sturgeon connects to Toast, Square, or Clover for sales and to 7shifts or Sling for shifts and punches, with OAuth and API keys and no data-migration project.
Other kinds of restaurant
See your own numbers in Sturgeon in under a week, with your POS connected, your forecasts calibrated, and Stu answering. White-glove onboarding is included.
No credit card. No six-month contract. Your data stays yours.