Newer companies now aspire to eliminate the need for translation, to create an analytics program that integrates all aspects of a restaurant’s operations into one system, with one password, in real time with mobile access, said Shu Chowdhury, the chief executive of a start-up called Salido, based in SoHo. One of its initial investors is the chef Tom Colicchio, who is using it as he revamps and expands his chain of ‘Wichcraft sandwich shops.

These new tools make a paradoxical promise: that they can take restaurants back to the good old days, before the business grew so big.

“The goal,” Mr. Oberholtzer said, “is to leverage the technology to do what we would do if we had one little restaurant and we were there all the time and knew every customer by name.”

Mr. Oberholtzer and his two partners opened the first of two dozen cafeteria-style restaurants in Culver City, Calif., in 2006, and plan to open an equal number in the Northeast by 2020. Every new Tender Greens will rely on what he calls “a whole rebuild of technology,” because the 11-year-old system it uses is about as up-to-date as a beeper.

He has decided on a combination of three systems that “play well with others,” he said, so there’s no communications problem: Brink POS software, a point-of-sale system that Mr. Oberholtzer says “is robust enough to handle volume and simple enough for our teams to use easily,” an essential combination for an expanding company; Olo, to coordinate online ordering and delivery; and the Punchh mobile app, which logs each customer’s name, email address and purchase history.

“It gives us ways to recognize people who’ve been in regularly, or haven’t been in for a while or have specific preferences,” Mr. Oberholtzer said.