05 · Kitchen management
Route every dish to its station, hold the mains until the table is ready, sell a dish out the moment it runs out and know what each plate costs. For independent kitchens that run on paper tickets and memory.
Starters and mains land on the pass together. The grill cook reads lines that belong to cold. A dish ran out an hour ago and is still on the website. A kilo of fillet goes missing and nobody sees it until the month-end figures.
Each of those is a remake, a refund or a margin you only discover later.
Set up the board
Open Kitchen in the sidebar on a tablet or wall screen. Click Stations, add Grill, Cold & pastry, Bar, then route each menu section once. A cook sees only the dishes their station makes.
Every order, one board
Website, collection, delivery and table orders all appear as tickets with the table or guest name, covers and a running timer. Each dish shows its options, the server's note and its allergens.
Control the pace
On the order pad, press HOLD on the mains and send the order. Starters go straight to the stations; the board counts the rest as on hold. When the table is ready, press Fire held dishes on its sheet.
At the pass
The Expo tab shows each whole table as one ticket with a prepared count, such as 0/4. Press Mark ready when it is complete, then Served when it leaves. The All day panel totals dishes still to cook.
Stop selling what you have run out of
In Service, open Menu and press Count on a dish. Type the portions left, an optional daily reset and a warning level. Every order takes one off, from any channel. At zero the dish sells out everywhere.
Paper when you want paper
Add a printer in Settings, paste its Server URL into the printer once and set its role. Online orders and orders sent from the order pad print on the kitchen printer; guest receipts print on the front-of-house one.
Know the cost of a plate
Add suppliers, then ingredients with a pack size, pack price, par level and storage. Build each dish's recipe by amount per portion. Food cost and GP show beside the dish and follow every price change.
Find what went missing
Press Receive on an ingredient for a delivery; a new pack price re-costs every dish that uses it. Press Waste with a quantity and a reason. Count the shelves in Stocktake, and Variance shows expected against counted, in units and pounds.
Order before you run out
Anything at or below par joins the Reorder tab, grouped by supplier with the packs needed and their cost. Copy order or Email sends it. The morning summary email names what is running low.
Watch it
A real run on the live app: stations routed, mains fired, a bump recalled, a dish counted.
How it connects
Orders come from your till, your site and your tables, and the kitchen's counts flow back to what guests can order.
Plan & price
Growth is £39 a month and Full is £69, excluding VAT. Kitchen ticket printing comes with Full. No per-seat charges, and nothing to pay until you publish.
Prices exclude VAT. 0% TableSpark commission on the bookings and orders your plan includes. Stripe’s standard card-processing fees apply to online payments. Compare every plan.
Any tablet or TV with a browser. Sign in to your TableSpark account on it, open Kitchen and leave it on. Add more screens for more stations.
Kitchen printing runs over Star's CloudPRNT protocol, so a CloudPRNT printer connects with one pasted link. Print the test page, then check your first few real tickets come off the paper as you expect.
Yes. The display and the printer are separate. Use the screen alone, or add paper where you want it.
No. Dishes without a recipe simply show no cost. Start with your best sellers and add more as you go; margins appear dish by dish.
Yes, struck through for guests, and it is no longer offered on new orders. Until close returns it by itself when the business day ends.
Build your site free, then open Kitchen and route your first station.