Guides·The big game
Game day: when the phone beats the kitchen
The big game does something no Friday ever does: every caller is ordering for a group, and everyone wants their food at kickoff. Pre-orders stack on top of live calls, and the phone turns into the busiest station in the building. Here is how to prep for it.
Why the phone breaks first
Your kitchen can prep for game day. You can par-cook wings, stack pizza dough, and portion taco fillings the night before. The phone can’t prep. It takes one call at a time, no matter how many people are dialing.
And game day calls are heavier. Nobody calls for one plate. It’s fifty wings for a living room, three large pizzas for a watch party, two dozen tacos for the in-laws. Every call on the board is a party order, and every call you miss is one too.
The stacking makes it worse. All week, pre-order calls ring the same line as everything else. Then in the last two hours before kickoff, everyone who didn’t plan ahead calls at once, right on top of the pre-orders being picked up.
Run a smaller menu on game day
Fewer choices means faster calls, faster tickets, and fewer mistakes. Print a one-page game day menu and sell only what’s on it.
Post it a few days early, on the door and on your pages, so regulars order from it instead of asking what happened to their usual.
- Wings in three sauces, not ten. Buffalo, lemon pepper, garlic parmesan. Sizes that match groups: 25, 50, 100.
- Whole pizzas only. Cheese, veggie, grilled chicken. No half-and-half, no build-your-own.
- Taco spots: two fillings, sold by the dozen. Seasoned beef or grilled chicken, fixings on the side.
- One or two family bundles. A 50-wing pack with fries and a two-liter soda saves the caller from deciding at all.
Announce a cutoff, then hold it
Pick a pre-order cutoff and say it everywhere: on the door, on your pages, and in the first breath when someone calls. For a 5:30 kickoff, something like “pre-orders close at 1:00” works.
A cutoff does two jobs. It pushes planners to call early, while your phone is still quiet. And it gives you a real count of what’s promised before the last-minute wave starts.
Stagger pickups and write the window on every ticket
If every pre-order says “ready at kickoff,” you’ve built a stampede. Assign pickup windows in 15-minute steps: 4:00, 4:15, 4:30. Write the window on every ticket, so the kitchen fires in order and the counter isn’t handing out fifty orders in the same five minutes.
Keep the pre-orders on a whiteboard by the phone: pickup time, name, the order, paid or not. When the rush hits, the board is the plan. Anyone can look up and see what fires next.
Prep the fussy stuff the night before
Game day cooking should be tossing, cutting, and boxing. Anything slower than that gets done the day before.
The goal is simple: on game day, nobody stops to measure, fold, or hunt for a pen.
- Portion sauce splits ahead. If half your orders come in half-buffalo, half-lemon-pepper, pre-fill and label the sauce cups the night before.
- Fold boxes and bag ranch, celery, and napkins into grab-and-go sets.
- Stage the phone area too: pens, the ticket pad, the whiteboard wiped and ruled, and the game day menu taped where whoever answers can read it at a glance.
What an unanswered ring costs today
On a normal Tuesday, a missed call might be one plate. During the pregame window, it’s a whole party’s food. That caller isn’t going to wait and try again at halftime. They have other numbers saved, and their guests are arriving either way.
Voicemail won’t save any of it. Check the box after any big game and you’ll find mostly hang-ups. Someone feeding a living room full of people wants a yes right now, not a callback.
Give the phone a way to answer everyone at once
Everything above fixes the kitchen side. The last choke point is one phone line and whoever can grab it between the fryer and the register. An AI phone operator removes that choke point: every caller gets picked up at the same time, so there is no busy signal at 4:45, and each call gets the same careful order the counter would take.
That’s what OrderVoice does. It answers every call at once and takes the full order the way a good counter person would, corrections, read-back, and all. It answers menu and hours questions straight from your menu, including a trimmed game-day version, updated within hours when you send it. And when a caller has a monster order that needs a human decision, it brings one of your people onto the line. You keep your number. The calls just stop going unanswered while the wings are in the fryer.
Hear it answer a real call.
Fifteen minutes, your menu, and the exact price. No commitment.