How Flights Restaurant Found the Perfect Partner in Kallpod

Upon entering any one of Flights Restaurant’s Bay Area locations, the first meaning of the chain’s name will become abundantly clear. The restaurant’s aviation theme is evinced in every aspect of the restaurant, from the pilot-style uniforms donned by the wait staff to the frequent-flyer-style rewards program to the actual scale-model fighter plane hanging from the ceiling. The name’s second meaning becomes clear only once you open the menu, whose array of brunch, lunch, dinner and cocktail items are all served in flights — trios of small portions meant for sampling and sharing.

Recently, Flights Restaurant introduced a new feature to all three of its locations, a communication platform designed specifically for the hospitality industry called Kallpod.

Kallpod’s sleek, three-button circular pod sits inconspicuously on restaurant tables and allow customers to call their servers or request their bill at the push of a button, providing better, faster service for customers while reducing the burden on waitstaff — no small convenience for a notoriously chaotic profession.

According to Flights Restaurant’s founder and CEO, Alex Hult, Kallpod’s utility and aesthetic both provided the perfect complement to the restaurant’s dual concepts.

“Literally everything on the menu is served in flights,” Hult said. “You order a cocktail, you get three different flavors. So there’s a lot of interaction with the servers. You are ordering tapas-style, and you may want to put in three or four orders before you finish your meal.”

Kallpod’s three buttons, typically customized into some variation of “check,” “server” and “another round,” in some ways is a much more sophisticated version of a flight attendant call button. The device is so well suited for Flights, that Hult says he had started conceiving of a similar device before finding out that Kallpod existed.

“We were working on coming up with something on our own,” he said. “We wanted a way for customers to get immediate service, and we wanted something like the call buttons on airplanes. We started doing research and found Kallpod, and it was exactly what we were thinking of. It was perfect.”

While Kallpod’s design and function offer the perfect complement to Flights Restaurant’s design in particular, the device has proven equally valuable to a range of restaurants, hotels, stadiums and any other venue that employs a waitstaff.

Where other tech solutions in the foodservice space have sought to reduce or altogether eliminate customer interaction with servers, Kallpod’s goal is simply to improve that experience, a differentiator the brand’s CEO, Gabriel Weisz, says has made the device a more popular solution for customers and management alike.

“Table-side ordering allows customers to complete the entire dining experience without really interacting with their server, but is this the experience the diner wants?” asks Weisz. “With our solution we really focused on enhancing human interaction and ensuring the server is accessible versus entirely automating the experience.”

Hult rolled out Kallpod in all three Flights Restaurants just a few months ago, and already he says it has vastly improved operations.

“To get things up and running, it was really a breeze,” he said. “It took us no time at all to get going, and it’s made it so much easier to keep track of everything,” he said. “Servers know exactly where they need to be, and the manager can make sure the servers are assigned appropriately.”

Hult says he’s nowhere near done growing the business he started just five years ago, and as Flights continues to expand, it will do so with Kallpod.

“We’re negotiating two new stand-alone restaurants right now, and eventually we’re going start looking into airports,” he said. “We’ve got big plans, and we’re excited to grow with Kallpod.”