Within moments of arriving at Seattle’s Addo restaurant, I was handed a Nintendo Switch controller and a can of Georgetown Brewing Company’s Bodhizafa IPA.

While chef Eric Rivera shuttled back and forth to the kitchen to bring out Puerto Rican snacks, Addo’s director of operations Ingrid Lyublinsky took another controller, jumped into a game of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe on a giant projector screen hanging inside the front window, chose Pink Gold Peach, and shot down the track riding a Bone Rattler while someone shouted Pew! Pew! Pew!

In the dimly lit restaurant, one guest said, “We’ll keep it to red shells only.” Another faceless voice replied, “The last time I played this, I looked at the wrong part of the screen the whole time.”

The whole affair had a neighborhood-bar vibe, somewhere between low-key dinner theater and having somebody over to smoke dope and chill in your living room.

Given the loose and playful atmosphere, you could be forgiven for not suspecting that Addo is one of the most innovative and tech-savvy restaurants in the country. It’s here that Rivera and his tiny team are developing a template that scores of struggling restaurants could use to stay afloat.

Chefs and restaurateurs in cities across the US struggle mightily with razor-thin margins, staffing issues, minimum wage, and maximum rent. Here in Seattle, unless you’re a hot new thing or a name-brand chef with a handful of spinoff restaurants, keeping seats full can be the most soul crushing part of the daily battle to stay in business. Rivera has cultivated a whole new software-driven business model at Addo that allows him to sidestep most of these worries. While he’s at it, he’s also rethinking the idea that restaurants should serve the same food from the same menu every night.

Rivera, who grew up in nearby Olympia and whose parents are from Puerto Rico, has the chops to pull it off: He was the longtime director of culinary research under chef Grant Achatz at Chicago’s ultra-high-end Alinea restaurant before returning to his native Washington. There, while working at a couple of Seattle restaurants, he also built a devoted following by serving pop-up dinners out of his home kitchen. With a fanbase firmly in place, he opened Addo in 2018.

Chef Eric Rivera Photograph: Angie Smith

Many restaurants use a limited amount of tech, and what they do use is centered around giant, multifaceted, often incredibly clunky programs with outdated interfaces like one called Compeat. They’re bloated Swiss army knives that can cover everything from shift scheduling to inventory. Chefs and restaurant managers often lose gobs of time fighting with these monster programs, trying to bend them to their will.