How to lay out kitchen screens for your kitchen

Start with the path a ticket takes, not the number of tablets

The question that decides a kitchen display layout is not how many screens you can afford. It is how many times a single ticket changes hands between arriving and going out of the door.

Draw that path on paper for one ordinary ticket. Every point where the work moves from one pair of hands to another is a candidate for a screen, and every point where it does not is not. A kitchen where one person cooks the whole plate needs one screen no matter how large the room is.

The demonstration on our home page uses three stations for this reason: an expo screen holding the whole order, and a grill screen and a fry screen that each see only their own part of it. That is a layout, not a package.

One screen is a layout, not a downgrade

A kitchen attached to a bar is still a kitchen, and its list of requirements is shorter on purpose. If the kitchen is one screen and not four, it should be priced as one screen, and it should run on a tablet you already own rather than on hardware bolted to a wall in a room guests stand in.

Two things matter more in this shape than in any other. Kiosk mode, so the tablet does the one job and nobody wanders off into a browser, because the tablet is somewhere a guest could reach it. And the ability to pause a screen and keep every setting for as long as you are closed, if the kitchen shuts for part of the year and the bar does not.

The pricing page publishes what a screen costs and what a paused screen costs. There is no form in front of either number.

A make line with more than one station

Once the line has more than one station, the screen's job changes from displaying orders to routing them. Prep, grill and expo each see only their own work, and each sends an order forward when its part is done.

Three things earn their place in this shape. The item summary bar, which counts what the whole board needs and ticks down as you work, if you batch fries and proteins ahead of the ticket. Timers that change colour on thresholds you set yourself. And the recall drawer, because on a real line a bump happens by elbow about as often as by hand, and a bumped ticket you cannot pull back is a ticket you have to ask a server about.

If a router reboot has ever stopped your line, the layout question and the reliability question are the same question. Orders already on the screen stay on the screen, every bump is recorded, and it syncs when the connection comes back.

Several brands sharing one room

A delivery-only kitchen runs more channels than seats, and the layout follows the channels rather than the sections of a dining room. Orders should be able to reach a station by channel as well as by category, because the thing that decides which cook takes it is often which brand it came in under.

Two constraints come with that shape. The orders do not all arrive from the same place, so the screen has to connect the point of sale you already use or accept orders typed in by hand. And each location's data has to be kept to itself, which is a property of the system rather than a setting you remember to switch on.

The one thing to do on your next shift

Walk one ticket from the printer to the pass and count the handoffs. That count, not a tier on a pricing page and not the number of tablets in the drawer, is how many screens your kitchen wants. If the count is one, buy one.