I didn't build this
to sell it
I'm Georges — just a regular guy who owns two restaurants in the Montreal region. I've been working in restaurants for 20 years, 10 of them as an owner. I've lived every version of the chaos — running dinner rush short-staffed, having my dishwasher quit mid-service and jumping in to wash dishes myself just to keep the kitchen moving, building schedules at midnight, chasing managers for checklists that never got done.
About a year ago, I started looking at AI tools for restaurants. And I realized something: they were all built by very smart engineers who had never worked a Friday night rush. The software was impressive — but it didn't understand how a restaurant actually runs. It didn't know what matters when you're on the floor and the tickets are piling up.
I had what they didn't — 20 years of experience. All I needed was to learn the AI and software side. So that's what I did. Every morning before the restaurant opened, I taught myself to build. I stayed up to date with the latest advancements in AI, learned the tools, wrote the code, and built ALMA piece by piece — not from a textbook, but from real problems I was solving in my own restaurant that same day.
I didn't build ALMA to make money. I built it to get my time back — and to be the first in this industry to move forward. Every feature exists because I needed it. The menu 3D, the AI dining companion, the operations agents — all of it was built as if I was the only customer. Because I was.
The multilingual AI and 3D menus? That came from watching my wife — she's from Venezuela, doesn't speak French or English — struggle to order at restaurants. I noticed she always wanted to go back to the same places — restaurants where she either understood the menu or already knew the food. If she felt that way, thousands of tourists and newcomers feel the same thing every day. I built ALMA so no guest ever has to point at a picture and hope for the best.
Then people started noticing. Other owners asked what I was using. They wanted it. That's when I decided to open the doors — but on my terms.
"I'm not a tech company. I'm a restaurant owner who built something powerful — and I want to share it with a handful of owners who are as excited about the future of dining as I am."
— Georges, Founder of Alma Restaurant Solutionsfrom the back office
on ALMA today