Seventeen years in restaurants taught her exactly what to build

Patrycja Sloma began building LENCUE in January 2026, at home with a broken foot and suddenly unable to work. For the first time in seventeen years she had real distance from the floor of a restaurant, and she used it to think about all the small frustrations she had spent those years quietly accepting as normal.

She had lived the problem from several angles, working across front of house and restaurant management. One frustration kept surfacing: why does a waiter still have to leave a guest and go hunting through menu PDFs, ask the kitchen, or track down the one experienced colleague who happens to remember the answer.

I was tired of watching good service depend on whether the right person happened to be working that evening.

The knowledge is already there

Restaurants, Sloma points out, are not short of knowledge. They are drowning in it, scattered across menu PDFs, wine lists, group chats, the kitchen, and the memories of a few veteran staff. The problem is getting the right piece of it to the right table at the exact second it is needed. LENCUE is a live-service tool that pulls that information together: front-of-house staff get quick access to ingredients, allergens, wine pairing cues, sold-out items, kitchen signals and table information, while service is actually happening.

The point, she is careful to say, is not to give waiters another screen to manage. It is to hand them the right answer in a few seconds so they can put their attention back on the guest. LENCUE is built to stay in the background. It is not there to replace sommeliers or human warmth, only to help more of a restaurant's existing knowledge reach the table.

The pilot that humbled her

When the first hotel-restaurant pilot went live, Sloma expected the team to explore the many features she had spent months building. Instead, usage came in far lower than she hoped. Her first instinct, after all that time and emotion, was to wonder whether the whole product was wrong.

Looking at it honestly, she saw the real answer: the product was asking for too much attention during service. Staff did not need an impressive amount of information. They needed a few clear answers, immediately. So she started removing and simplifying features rather than trying to persuade anyone to use them.

Something can be clever, beautifully designed, and completely unnecessary. In hospitality, usefulness is measured in seconds.

Building it the hard way

She is doing all of this while working full time and raising a five-year-old, without a technical team, outside funding or a founder network. The work happens at night, after her job and her family are seen to. Learning to build the product was hard; convincing cautious, constantly-pitched hospitality people to try something new has been harder. A good idea, she has learned, does not create trust on its own. You earn it through conversations, consistency and evidence from real service.

Her near-term goal is five active restaurant pilots before the end of 2026. The longer vision is for LENCUE to become a trusted live-service layer for restaurants and hotels, one clear place for tables, orders, menu knowledge, allergens and wine guidance. Part of why she keeps going is her daughter, who watches her build it around everything else. Sloma wants her to see that you do not need to start as an expert, or wait for anyone's permission, to make something.

This profile is drawn from Patrycja Sloma's own account of building LENCUE, an early-stage venture with its first pilot live. Product details are as described by the founder.