Dinesurf: How a third-generation hospitality family is rewriting the economics of African restaurants

At a Nigerian startup, where the third generation of a hospitality dynasty is at the helm, a different philosophy is taking root around the African restaurant business.

Dinesurf wants to be the digital engine powering Africa’s restaurant market.

The story began in the 1970s with an Italian-trained chef at the Legacy Hotel in Port Harcourt. Dinesurf CEO Martins Udotai and CTO Joshua Udotai’s grandfather was an executive chef. Their grandmother ran a restaurant for nearly three decades, and their mother managed a ghost kitchen. But with that legacy came a haunting reality: when the founder gets sick, the business dies. 

The initial drive was to build technology that would allow family businesses to exist without constant physical presence. But the actual problem Dinesurf tackled when it began in 2020 was the difficulty of finding good restaurants with up-to-date online information.

After years of being wrongly perceived as just another discovery platform for diners, Dinesurf has repositioned as a B2B “Guest Growth OS” run by third-generation hospitality entrepreneurs with a $15 billion appetite. 

The result has been explosive. “We went from processing N600,000 a month to N4 million in a single day,” said Ruemu Oghuvwu, Dinesurf’s COO.

The velocity of their growth is a masterclass in product-market fit. Their first N100 million in processed volume took nearly a year. The second 100 million? Just nine weeks. Today, heavyweight Abuja spots like Food and Ocean Tepanyaki are processing upwards of N40 million in monthly deposits through Dinesurf. Bamboa Lagos, a newly onboarded restaurant, also processes millions in deposits.

“We went from N700,000 a month in reservation deposits to N6,800,000 in the first month,” said Field and Ocean’s executive team.

How Dinesurf works 

Imagine you are running an nkwobi stand. Usually, you just sit there and hope people walk by. But what if you had a helper sending customers to you? That is what Dinesurf is for a restaurant. But as “Guest Growth OS”, it’s more than that.

When someone is hungry and searches Google for “best pizza nearby,” Dinesurf ensures your restaurant name appears first so people can find it easily. Once they find the restaurant, Dinesurf gives them a beautiful digital door (a website) that works perfectly. It makes it so easy to book a table that it’s like clicking a single button to say, “I’m coming!”

This is the coolest part. Dinesurf keeps a secret notebook (a CRM) for the restaurant. It remembers that a customer loves their pounded yam with egusi, and that their birthday is in May. A few weeks after the first experience, Dinesurf sends the customer a friendly note: “Hey! Remember that egusi soup you loved? You can now have it with isapa! Come back and see us soon.” This turns a one-time visitor into a best friend of the restaurant.

While most apps just help you find food, Dinesurf helps the restaurant find you, welcome you, and make sure you keep coming back for more. 

Beauty, visibility, and the functionality moat

For Joshua Udotai, Dinesurf’s CTO, a restaurant’s website must be beautiful enough to attract a palate. But while he is obsessed with aesthetics, evidenced by the designs on the website, he is the first to admit that pretty alone doesn’t pay the bills. 

“Beauty converts, but functionality is also crucial,” Joshua told Condia.

Dinesurf’s websites are so aesthetically pleasing and functional that customers often become evangelists. In a market like Kigali, for instance, customers discovered Dinesurf without active advertising.

This philosophy of beauty and functionality is baked into the Dinesurf “Guest Growth OS”, a high-performance engine designed to solve three specific problems:

1. SEO

A restaurant can have the best Jollof in Lagos, but if it doesn’t appear on page one of a Google search, it doesn’t exist. Dinesurf uses advanced SEO to ensure its clients dominate search results. The impact is staggering: Dinesurf currently pulls in 1.4 million monthly impressions from search alone. By turning discovery into a science, they funnel 15,000 to 20,000 people per month to their partner restaurants across Nigeria, Rwanda, Kenya, South Africa, and the US.

2. Conversion

Most restaurant websites lose customers at the booking stage due to clunky interfaces. Dinesurf’s integrated booking engine boasts a conversion rate of 40% to 60%, a figure that dwarfs the industry average. By replacing the ‘call and wait’ model with a seamless, one-click reservation deposit system, they now process between 1,000 and 2,000 bookings per month, ensuring that intent translates directly into revenue.

3. Retention

Perhaps the most powerful feature of the OS is data retention. In the traditional model, third-party apps own the customer’s data. With Dinesurf, the restaurant owns the relationship.

The road to a billion

The vision for the next five years is bold. Martins wants to unlock the next $15 billion in transactional revenue for the entire African hospitality industry, including hotels and nightlife. 

“In the next five years, the vision for Dinesurf is to build the Guest Growth OS that unlocks the next $1 billion in transaction revenue for food and hospitality businesses and the next $15 in transaction revenue for the entire African hospitality business, including nightlife and resorts,” he said.

Ruemu sees Dinesurf as the go-to solution for every hospitality brand on the continent. Joshua aims for Dinesurf to be the engine comparable to Booking.com or Resy, but built with an African heartbeat.

As they eye their first N1 billion month and aim to become Africa’s next largest hospitality aggregator, managing restaurants, ghost kitchens, and hotels, the Dinesurf team is digitising a legacy they inherited. For the thousands of African restaurants still operating on pen and paper, the “Guest Growth OS” is the future of how Africa eats.

Last updated: March 31, 2026