How a Lagos restaurant cut missed calls by 70% with Maraba

Tomiwa Adegoke opened Ìjókòó Kitchen — a Yoruba phrase meaning "sit and eat" — in Lekki Phase 1 in 2023. The restaurant specialises in contemporary Yoruba cuisine: pepper soup, efo riro with native seafood, pounded yam made fresh daily. Within a year of opening, it had a steady weekend crowd and a growing reputation in the Lekki food community.

The problem was the phone. Ìjókòó Kitchen has a single reservations line. Tomiwa runs the kitchen on Friday and Saturday evenings. His front-of-house manager, Damilola, handles service, which means she is rarely at the host desk long enough to take a call. Their cook cannot answer the phone without abandoning the stove.

"On a Friday evening between 6pm and 8pm, we might miss 15 calls," Tomiwa said. "That is 15 tables that went somewhere else. Sometimes you call them back by 9pm and they have already eaten."

The before picture

Before Maraba, Ìjókòó Kitchen's reservations process looked like this:

• Calls during service hours: missed 40–50% of the time
• Calls after 10pm: never answered — voicemail was rarely checked before 8am the next day
• WhatsApp messages: answered sporadically, sometimes 24 hours later
• Large group bookings (10+): required multiple back-and-forth calls to confirm details

Tomiwa estimated that missed reservations were costing the restaurant between ₦80,000 and ₦150,000 per weekend in lost revenue — groups of six or eight who called, could not get through, and booked elsewhere.

What they configured

Ìjókòó Kitchen signed up for the Maraba Starter plan in October 2025. The setup took three hours over two evenings. Here is what they configured:

Six months of results

By April 2026, the numbers had shifted substantially:

The Yoruba-English code-switching difference

One thing Tomiwa noted was how well Maraba handled the specific way Lekki Yoruba speakers call. His customers rarely speak pure Yoruba or pure English. A typical reservation call goes: "Hello, I want to book table for Saturday — ẹni mẹfa, tabi o le jẹ meje" (six people, or it could be seven). Maraba processes both the English and the Yoruba in the same sentence and captures: group size 6–7, Saturday.

"I had one customer call and say she was impressed when Maraba responded to her Yoruba greeting without missing a beat," Tomiwa said. "She told us at dinner she had expected it to be like those frustrating banking IVR systems that only speak bank-English."

A Friday evening — what it looks like now

Tomiwa is in the kitchen from 5pm on Friday. His phone is in his apron pocket. Between 6pm and 9pm, he receives 20–25 WhatsApp summaries from Maraba. He glances at each one between dishes. Most say "Booked — 4 covers, Saturday 7:30pm" or "Booked — 2 covers, Friday 9:00pm." He reads and moves on.

When a large group calls — eight people for a 50th birthday — Maraba takes the details, tells the caller that large group bookings require a brief confirmation call, and pings Tomiwa immediately. He calls back within 15 minutes. The caller already knows the details are noted; the callback is just to confirm and arrange the deposit. The whole thing used to take three callback attempts. Now it takes one.

Cost vs. return

The Starter plan costs Ìjókòó Kitchen ₦20,000 per month. Tomiwa estimates that recovering even three weekend reservation groups per month — at an average of ₦45,000 per group table — more than covers the cost. The restaurant now also uses Maraba's analytics to understand which nights have the highest call volumes and adjusts their staffing schedule accordingly.