The problem the brochure never mentions
Ordering at the table with a QR code sounds simple: sticker on the table, guest scans, order in the kitchen. Until you remember that the sticker is printed. It never changes. Anyone who has seen it once can photograph it and open it at home.
Without an answer to that, a QR code on a table is an open door to your kitchen.
Why location is not the answer
The obvious fix is to ask the phone where it is. That does not work, for two reasons.
A location can be faked, and it takes no effort. More importantly, you lose the guests who simply refuse the prompt, or who are sitting at the back where there is no signal. You would be building a hurdle that stops the honest guest and not the other kind.
What does work: the table has to be open
The heart of it is simple. The code only does anything while the table is open on the register.
Staff open the table when people sit down — one tap on the floor plan. From that moment the code works. Once the bill is closed, it stops. Someone opening it at home is told, politely, that the table is not open.
That is no extra work, because the table had to be opened anyway. And it cannot be worked around by changing something on the phone, because the decision sits with the register.
Four layers, none of them annoying for the guest
The table is open on the register. The most important one, and free: it follows from how you already work.
Every table has its own code. Not running numbers you can guess, but a random string. If a sticker disappears, you reissue that one table and the old code is dead.
Staff approve the order. The register shows "Table 4 — 2× pizza, 1× cola". One tap and it goes to the kitchen. That is also your age check when there is alcohol on it, and it catches a wrongly scanned table before any food is made.
A limit per table. A handful of orders every few minutes. Plenty for a table that is genuinely hungry, not enough to flood your kitchen.
That approval looks like a chore. It is not
It is tempting to push orders through automatically — one less action. We do support that, and it is deliberately switched off.
There is alcohol on nearly every menu. The moment someone reads "Table 4 wants two beers" on the register is the only moment anyone can look at who is sitting there. Automate that away and you have not gained efficiency; you have moved a risk onto enforcement.
And it costs one tap.
All you can eat is a different story
On an unlimited menu an extra dish costs the guest nothing. So there is no natural brake on what goes into the kitchen, and you notice that when twenty dishes arrive at once.
That calls for limits: how many dishes per round, how long between rounds, and how long the sitting lasts. Two things people forget:
Drinks do not belong on the same brake. A table that has to wait twenty minutes for a glass of water because they just ordered food will call you anyway. Then the brake creates work instead of calm.
Dishes with a surcharge should not count. The guest pays for those separately, and the brake is already there: the bill.
What you get out of it
Fewer walks for drinks, no more scraps of paper, and a guest who does not have to wait for someone to pass by to order one more thing. Staff keep time for the things they are actually needed for.
What it is not: a way to run with fewer people. The order still has to be approved, made and carried over.
See it yourself
Ordering at the table is part of the PRO plan, along with all you can eat and the buttons a guest uses to call staff or ask for the bill.
