Why I'm Building Passione AI
By Takhir Kholikberdiev
I've spent a good chunk of my life in hospitality. Different countries, different concepts, different lessons. Some worked, some didn't. But one thing stayed the same everywhere: the back office eats you alive.
Last August I opened Passione Wine Bar in Paphos, Cyprus. A wine-first place — 150+ bottles, Mediterranean food. It's the kind of place I always wanted to build.
And within weeks, I found myself spending more time on operations than on the things that made me open the place.
WhatsApp messages at midnight. Stock that never matches the count. Finance that only makes sense once a month. Guests who message three restaurants and book whichever replies first.
I didn't want another hire. I wanted a different approach.
Five back-office roles at Cyprus salaries is over €13,000 a month. For a 12-table wine bar, that's not realistic. But even if I could afford it — hiring doesn't solve the problem. People leave, get sick, need training. The routine work stays the same.
So I started building. An AI system that could handle the operational side — and that any restaurant could use.
It worked. Better than I expected.
We now have four AI agents running at Passione. George handles bookings — every WhatsApp message, under 30 seconds, in three languages. Sofia keeps the finances visible in real time. Marco watches stock. Luca finds patterns in the data I never had time to look at.
Is it perfect? No. We're still figuring things out. Some weeks I discover something that needs fixing, something the AI handles awkwardly, a flow that could be better. But the direction is clear. I spend my days on wine and guests now — not on spreadsheets.
I believe this is the future. And I want to share it.
I'm a restaurateur who decided to build something. What we have at Passione works — and it shouldn't stay in one restaurant. Every owner I talk to faces the same challenges.
So we're turning it into Passione AI — a platform where any restaurant can get the same AI team, deployed in minutes, fully managed. It's early. It's not polished. But it's real, it runs every day, and it gets better every week.
We're running a pilot programme now — looking for restaurants ready to try a new approach to operations.
If you run a restaurant and any of this sounds familiar — I'd genuinely love to hear from you. We have a small team behind this, and we're looking for restaurants willing to try it and help us make it better.
