The guide to kitchen display systems.

Four things, and only the first is obvious.

It shows every order source in one queue. Counter, phone, your own site and the delivery apps land in the same list in the order they arrived, so nobody is checking three tablets on a shelf against a printer. It times each ticket, so a docket that's been up for eighteen minutes turns a colour and the pass knows before the customer does. It routes items, so the grill sees grill items and the cold section sees cold items. And it keeps a record, so at the end of the week you can see your real ticket times by hour, and which dish is holding up every table it appears on.

Paper does none of that. Paper is a snapshot that curls up in the heat and then falls behind the shelf.

Sometimes paper genuinely is fine, and it's worth saying so before you spend anything.

If you're a small takeaway with one chef, thirty orders a night and a single station, a printer and a rail does the job and a screen adds very little. The case for a KDS gets strong when any of these is true: more than one station, more than one order channel, more than a handful of orders in flight at once, or a service where things get remade because a docket went missing.

The cost of paper is real but it's spread out, so it hides. A remade main is the food cost twice plus a table waiting. A missed docket at eight on a Saturday is a refund and a bad review. A printer that jams during a rush costs you the ten minutes nobody has. Count how often those happen over a month before deciding the printer is free.

Ignore the demo video and check the plumbing. Nearly all of the difference between systems is in these points.

Course firing means the kitchen doesn't start the mains until somebody says the table is ready for them. Starters go on when the order lands, the mains sit held on screen, and front of house fires them when the plates are cleared.

If you do sit-down service, it's the single most useful feature on the list, because it's the difference between food arriving when it's wanted and food sitting under a lamp going grey. If you're a takeaway or a delivery-only kitchen, you don't need it at all, and turning it on will only add a step. Be honest about which you are.

The related setting worth getting right is prep time by dish. If a burger takes eight minutes and chips take four, they should start four minutes apart, not together. A system that knows the difference will sequence the ticket for you. A system that doesn't will hand you two hot things and one cold one.

It splits the ticket by section, so the grill screen shows the grill items and the fryer screen shows the fryer items, with the pass keeping the whole order in view to put it together.

In a two-section kitchen it's still worth doing, because it takes the noise off each screen. In a one-section kitchen it's pointless, and forcing it will slow your chef down while they hunt for a full ticket. There's a middle option a lot of small restaurants end up using and are happy with: one screen showing everything, with the items grouped by section on the ticket so the eye finds them fast.

One warning from real kitchens. If you route items to separate screens without a screen at the pass showing the whole order, things get plated and nobody knows what's still missing. Keep one screen that sees everything.

A bump bar if there are gloves, water or flour involved, a touchscreen if the screen is at the pass and hands are relatively clean.

Touchscreens are cheaper and there's nothing to learn. The problem is the same one every kitchen has with phones: greasy hands, wet hands, a glove that the screen doesn't register. A physical bump bar solves all of that, gets bumped without looking after a week, and survives being cleaned down with a cloth at the end of the night.

Whichever you pick, check two practical things. Can it be cleaned properly, since environmental health will ask. And is there a way to undo a bump, because somebody will clear a ticket by accident on the first Friday and you need to bring it straight back.

Less than you'd think, but where it goes matters more than what it is.

A 15 to 24 inch screen or a solid tablet on a mount, commonly in the €200 to €500 range for the display itself, plus a mount and a power run. Site it at eye level for whoever reads it most, out of the direct path of steam and out of the fryer's line of fire, and where the daylight from the back door doesn't wash it out at five in the afternoon. Get the cabling done properly and tucked away, because a trailing lead in a kitchen is a hazard and a service risk.

This is the part owners get most value from and use least.

Median ticket time by hour tells you where service falls apart, and it's usually a narrower window than anyone in the building thinks. Ticket time by dish tells you which item is holding up every order it appears in, which is often a menu problem rather than a kitchen problem. Volume by station shows you which section is the bottleneck at eight on a Friday, which is a rota question. And remakes and recalls, logged with a reason, tell you whether errors are coming from the order screen, the pass or the print.

Read them weekly rather than daily. One bad Saturday tells you about that Saturday. Four weeks of numbers tells you about your kitchen.

Slowly, on a quiet shift, with the printer still plugged in.

Set it up on a Tuesday morning and put a few real orders through it with the chef standing there, changing the layout until it reads the way they think. Run the first live shift with both the screen and the printer going, and let people use whichever they trust. Take the printer out of the routine when nobody has looked at it for a couple of days, not before.

Expect the kitchen to be sceptical for a shift and converted by the end of the week, once they've had a rush without a lost docket. And ask the provider one specific question before you commit: what does the screen do when the broadband drops mid-service? Eclyde's kitchen display keeps running locally and syncs when the line returns, which is what you want from anything mounted on a kitchen wall.