Smart Café
How I'd remove the queue from a high-volume café: QR table ordering, a live kitchen display, payment in the flow and an order-ready alert.
Concept — this shows how I would design it. It has not been built for a client yet.
Context
At peak hours, cafés lose sales to the queue: customers walk out, staff juggle orders by hand, and paying is a second queue. This concept shows how I'd design the whole flow end to end.
What I'd build
- A mobile web menu opened from a QR code on each table and tied to the table number.
- An order API that takes payment — Mada, cards and Apple Pay through a gateway such as Moyasar — before the ticket reaches the kitchen.
- A kitchen display with live tickets over WebSockets, and a one-tap "ready" that notifies the guest.
Architecture
- Users
- My code
- Services
- Third-party APIs
- Data
Hover or focus a component to see what it talks to.
Problems the design solves
Peak-hour bursts
Orders arrive in waves. Tickets are queued and stored first, so nothing is dropped when the kitchen is busiest.
Paid before it's made
The kitchen only sees an order once payment is confirmed, which removes unpaid tickets entirely.
Stack
- Next.js
- Node.js
- PostgreSQL
- WebSockets
- Moyasar
Outcome
A concept, not yet built for a client. It is the architecture I'd propose to a café or restaurant group that wants to remove queues.
Need something like this?
Tell me about your business and the systems you already use. I'll tell you honestly what it takes.
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