Before we opened: the kitchen ChatGPT helped us find

ChatGPT helped us find the kitchen before we opened Chloe’s Mama Kitchen. The useful detail was a rental listing whose map pointed to the wrong building.

Cindy had been cooking at home, sharing the Malaysian food she grew up with. In her recent Triple H radio interview, she talked about our daughter encouraging her to share that cooking with more people. Before we could do that, we needed somewhere to cook.

We were looking for an affordable, convenient second kitchen: a commercial space that could work for a small food business. Rent mattered. So did the location. We kept looking because taking on the wrong place would be expensive.

At the time, our way of using AI was very manual. About once a week, we opened ChatGPT and asked it to research places online and summarise what it found. We would ask again the following week, looking across different locations. There was no automated search running in the background for us.

One of those searches brought up an opportunity on a property management company’s own website. We hadn’t found it on the big rental websites we were checking. It was the sort of smaller source that was easy to miss.

The listing was confusing. The location information and the map didn’t match: the map pointed to a different building next door. If you followed that pin, you could end up judging the wrong premises.

ChatGPT picked up the mismatch and helped us work out which shop the advertisement actually referred to. That gave us a place worth following up.

There didn’t seem to be much other interest, and we were able to secure a deal that worked for us. We think the confusing listing may have helped keep interest low, though we can’t know why other people passed it over. We also can’t put a number on how much of the deal came from that mistake.

For a small business, I think this is a useful place to start with AI: give it one real job that is already taking up your time. Our job was finding a kitchen we could afford. A weekly search, a summary and a closer look at a confusing advertisement made a practical difference.

If you’re trying something similar, ask for direct links to the original listings, include smaller property managers, and ask it to flag conflicts between the written address and the map. Open the sources yourself and confirm the premises and terms with the agent. An AI answer gives you something to investigate.

This is the first in our series about using AI around a small kitchen, from finding premises to preparing to open, then everyday operations and marketing. We’ll share what we asked it to do, what happened and what still needed our judgement.

Next came the less visible work: figuring out the to-do list and the documents we needed before opening. That’s the next story.