The kitchen display

What is on the screen

Accepted orders, oldest first, with the items and quantities and any modifiers the customer chose. Each one shows which table it belongs to and how long it has been waiting. Nothing else competes for the space — there is no revenue banner and no chart on a kitchen screen.

Three taps, and none of them asks who you are

An order moves accepted → preparing → ready, one tap each. A waiter marks it served when it reaches the table.

Kitchen tablets are shared. Everybody touches them, often with a cloth in the other hand, and a device that asks for a PIN before you can mark a plate ready will be worked around within a week — usually by leaving it permanently unlocked, which is worse than never locking it. So the routine kitchen actions stay one fast tap.

The things that genuinely need a named human — changing a price, editing the menu, voiding a line, managing staff — are not on this screen at all. They live where somebody is signed in as themselves.

The screen tells you when it has gone quiet

A kitchen display with nothing on it means one of two very different things: no new orders, or the tablet fell off the network twenty minutes ago and you have been cooking nothing while orders piled up somewhere else.

Each device reports in continuously, and the owner and staff views distinguish those two states and show when the kitchen was last heard from. A reachable database is not the same as a healthy café, and the product refuses to imply otherwise.

Corrections are part of the job

Staff can reject an order before it is started, cancel one that was accepted, fix a status that was tapped by mistake, add an order taken verbally at the counter, and close a table that was left open.

Every one of those is recorded with who did it and when. Software that cannot be corrected in front of a waiting customer gets abandoned by lunchtime, so the overrides are a designed feature rather than an escape hatch — and the record is what keeps them honest.

On timings

Customers see a broad preparation range the café configures, not a predicted minute. Timestamps are recorded at every step from day one, because they are cheap to collect now and impossible to collect retrospectively — but recording them is not the same as claiming we can predict your kitchen, and we do not pretend to yet.