Privacy Policy

New Sitara Indian Cuisine is a single-location, family-run Indian restaurant and catering business in Austin, Texas. This policy covers everyone whose information reaches us: catering and to-go customers, people who message or call us, visitors who use the assistant on this website, and our own staff.

It is written to be read, not to be survived. If anything here is unclear, email info@sitaraaustin.com and a person will answer.

When you order

• Your name, phone number, and email address if you give one.
• The delivery or event address for a catering order.
• What you ordered: dishes, tray sizes, quantities, dates, times, and any special instructions or allergy notes you tell us.
• A running count of your orders and total spend, so we recognise regulars and can honour past preferences.

When you message or call

• The content of messages you send us on WhatsApp, by text, or through the chat on this website, and transcripts of phone enquiries.
• From those conversations we keep short extracted notes — a preferred spice level, a repeat event date, a dish a group disliked — used to serve you better next time.

When you pay

Payments are processed by our point-of-sale and delivery partners, not by us. We receive the order total and payment status. We never receive or store your full card number or security code.

Our own staff

Staff accounts hold a username, a hashed password, a role, and the permissions attached to it. Some staff have additionally chosen to enrol a face template for signing in. Face enrolment is voluntary, is used only to sign that person in, is never shared or sold, and is deleted on request or when the person leaves.

• To fulfil your order — cook it, price it, and deliver it to the right place at the right time.
• To answer you — reply to quotes, questions, and changes.
• To forecast — knowing what sells on which weekends lets us buy the right amount and throw less food away.
• To understand our own costs — matching supplier invoices against what we actually served.
• To recommend better — suggesting quantities and dishes that worked for similar events.

We do not use your information to build advertising profiles, and we run no advertising or analytics trackers on this website. There is no third-party pixel, tag manager, or session recorder on any page we operate.

When you place an order, send us a message, or start a chat, you are giving us the information needed to serve you, and we take that as your consent to use it for the purposes in §3. We ask for nothing beyond what the order or the conversation requires.

You can withdraw that consent at any time by emailing info@sitaraaustin.com. Withdrawing it means we delete what we hold under §10; it may also mean we can no longer look up your past orders or honour standing preferences. Staff give separate, explicit consent before any face template is enrolled, and may withdraw it without affecting their employment.

Some replies — on this website’s chat, and sometimes on WhatsApp — are drafted with the help of an AI language model. To produce a reply, the text of your message is sent to the model provider that generates it. Providers process it to return an answer; we do not sell your data to them and do not authorise them to use it for advertising.

If you would rather not have a message handled this way, say so, or call the restaurant — a person will always take over. Nothing about your order depends on using the assistant.

We use established service providers to run the restaurant. Each receives only what it needs to do its job, and none is permitted to use your information for its own purposes.

We will also disclose information where the law requires it, such as a valid subpoena or a tax authority request.

Sitara uses Plaid to connect its own business bank and card accounts so the owner can reconcile supplier invoices, utilities, and operating costs against what actually left the business account. This is bookkeeping for the restaurant.

• Everything travels over an encrypted connection (TLS 1.2 or better). Nothing moves in plain text.
• Our database and its backups are encrypted at rest with AES-256.
• Staff see only what their role requires; financial records are restricted to the owner and protected by a second factor.
• Passwords are stored as one-way hashes, never as readable text.
• Our full set of controls, including known gaps and the dates they are being closed, is written down in our Information Security Policy, available on request.

No system is perfectly secure, and we will not pretend otherwise. If a breach ever affects your information, we will tell you promptly and tell you what to do about it.

When a retention period ends, or when you ask us to delete your information, we remove it rather than archiving it indefinitely.

Whatever the law in your state requires of a business our size, we offer these to everyone:

1. Know what we hold about you, and why.
2. Correct anything that is wrong — a misspelled name, an old address.
3. Delete what we hold, except records we are legally required to keep for tax purposes, which we will identify to you.
4. Get a copy of your information in a readable form.
5. Opt out of messages from us at any time.

Email info@sitaraaustin.com, or ask any manager in the restaurant. We reply within 30 days. We will not charge you, and we will not treat you any differently for asking.

Our services are for adults ordering food. We do not knowingly collect information from children under 13. If you believe a child has given us information, tell us and we will delete it.

We review this policy quarterly and whenever we change how we handle information. The version and effective date above always reflect the current text.

Questions, requests, or complaints: info@sitaraaustin.com, or speak to us at the restaurant. The owner reads it.