How we built a WhatsApp AI chatbot for a HK restaurant in 5 days

Scope, stack and lessons from shipping a bilingual WhatsApp ordering and reservations bot end-to-end in under a week.

A Hong Kong restaurant came to us on a Monday wanting a WhatsApp assistant live by the weekend. We scoped tight: reservations, menu Q&A, allergen info and a clean handover to staff. The stack was WhatsApp Cloud API, an LLM grounded on the menu and FAQ, and a small ops dashboard. Replies in English and Cantonese, sub-5-second response, and a fallback to a human during service hours. Launched Friday, hit 60% deflection on common queries by week two.