The Madrid Restaurant That Hired an AI Employee (and an Owner Who Learned to Run It)

The Problem

Hatillo is a gourmet burger restaurant in the Las Rosas neighbourhood of Madrid: 4.7 stars on Google across more than 2,000 reviews, a short walk from the Metropolitano stadium, and packed on concert and match days.

The kitchen was never the problem. The problem was everything around it. Supplier invoices piling up in the inbox for the accountant. Instagram posts that never got made. Review replies postponed. Supplier orders dictated by memory at midnight. Miguel was running a full restaurant and a full back office at the same time, and the back office always lost.

He didn't want a consultant who does the work and leaves an invoice. He wanted to stop depending on anyone, including me.

What I Built

An AI Employee, Working Inside the Business

I installed an AI assistant directly on Miguel's own computer and trained it on his business: his suppliers, his menu, his brand, his way of writing. He named her Claudia. She drafts supplier orders, prepares Instagram posts, writes review replies in his voice, and analyses his marketing numbers. Everything goes through Miguel's approval before it touches the real world; she works, he decides.

A second assistant runs on the restaurant's own server and answers on Telegram around the clock, so the business has help even when the laptop is closed.

The Part Most Consultants Skip: Teaching the Owner

Instead of keeping the magic to myself, I taught it. A series of hands-on classes (75€ per session), each one built around a real task in his restaurant: managing suppliers, creating content, analysing his numbers, building his own tools.

Here's how far that went. Within three months, Miguel had rebuilt his restaurant's entire website himself, built his own stock-and-orders app, and assembled his own marketing dashboard, all with his assistant, none of it billed by me. When I audited his setup in August, his assistant knew more than a hundred of his routines, from drafting a supplier order to preparing a post. I set up fewer than ten of them. The rest is his.

Invoices That File Themselves

While the training ran, the heaviest paperwork got automated for good. Since June, every supplier invoice that arrives by email is read, recognised by supplier, renamed properly, and filed into the right folder for the accountant: dozens of invoices every month, day and night, without anyone touching them. Anything the system can't read safely (like a password-protected PDF) goes to a person with a polite alert instead of getting lost. It has run without interruption ever since, and every real-world surprise along the way became a permanent fix.

Getting Found on Google

The engagement also covered local search. The first blog post I wrote for the restaurant reached page 1 of Google within 10 days, aimed at the searches that bring hungry people to that exact neighbourhood: where to eat near the stadium on a match or concert day. A month later that one post was being seen thousands of times per month in Google results, and it has grown into a four-post series. Today Miguel publishes his own posts; my job moved from writing to advising.

What This Means If It Were Your Business

The AI works where you work. On your computer, your folders, your tools, trained on your documents and your voice. Not a generic chatbot on a website.
You approve everything. The assistant prepares; you decide. Nothing reaches a customer or a supplier without your yes.
You stop depending on me on purpose. The training exists so that next year you need me less, not more. That's the point.
The boring paperwork just disappears. Invoices, filing, drafts: handled, with problems flagged to a person instead of silently lost.
The pattern is not restaurant-only. The same kind of assistant now works in a Madrid law office, drafting legal documents in the firm's own style. In the words of Juan Pedro Mateos, the lawyer who runs it: "We have saved a lot of time and can now give our clients far more attention, and it catches errors in our documents that used to take us days to find." (Translated; his full review is on this site.)
Clear costs. A one-time installation, training sessions at 75€ each, and light monthly maintenance from 100€ for the systems that must never break.

What Worked, What Didn't

Teaching beat doing. The single best return in this engagement came from the classes, not the code. A tool I build helps once; an owner who can build helps forever. Miguel's website rebuild alone would have been a four-figure project on any agency's invoice. He did it himself.

Real production bites, and that's good. The invoice system met the real world: password-protected PDFs, suppliers sending five invoices in one email, the same supplier spelled three different ways. Each surprise became a permanent fix, and the fixes are why it runs unattended today.

Autonomy needs guardrails. When the owner starts building his own tools, someone still has to watch the foundations: passwords and access, copies of everything, the machine it all runs on. That's what the maintenance plan covers, and it's the part an owner shouldn't have to learn.

What the Owner Says

In Miguel's words, translated from Spanish:

"First came the excitement, then the ability to keep creating. And we keep going."

The Result

The assistant's own work records tell the story: since going live she has prepared more than 340 supplier and guest messages for Miguel's one-tap approval, runs a morning briefing and a pre-service briefing every single day, files dozens of supplier invoices a month, and produces the restaurant's ad creatives and weekly analysis. Averaged over the ten weeks since she started, that adds up to a conservative 6 to 8 hours a week given back to the owner, before counting the one-off projects.

An AI assistant embedded in the daily running of the restaurant, grown by the owner himself from fewer than ten routines to more than a hundred
A second assistant on the restaurant's server, reachable on Telegram 24/7
Dozens of supplier invoices filed automatically every month since June, with anything unreadable flagged to a person instead of lost
A blog whose first post hit page 1 of Google in 10 days and became a four-post series
An owner who rebuilt his own website, built his own apps, and still keeps me for what he shouldn't have to touch: the infrastructure, from 100€/month

How Working With Me Looks

A free 15-minute call. You tell me where the hours go, and you leave with the two or three tasks an assistant could take off your plate, whether or not we ever work together.
Installation plus training. The assistant arrives working, and the sessions make it yours: your tasks, your voice, your pace.
Light maintenance. Month to month, no lock-in. I keep the foundations solid; you run the business.

The specifics here are a restaurant, but the pattern fits any owner-run business drowning in admin: a law office, a clinic, a workshop. An assistant trained on your business, an owner trained to run it, and the paperwork quietly handled underneath.

What would you hand to an assistant who never sleeps and never quits? Let's talk for 15 minutes and I'll tell you honestly whether this fits. You can also see what I build.