Kitchen display system
Station-based ticket management for prep, expo, and timing control.
The KDS is where the restaurant order stops being theoretical and starts becoming service.
Openfront Restaurant already routes tickets by kitchen station, tracks ticket age, supports all-day views, and lets staff complete items individually instead of treating the whole order like a single block.
What the KDS does today
- groups tickets by kitchen station
- filters by active status
- separates prep and expediter lanes
- highlights urgent tickets
- tracks overdue and critical timing thresholds
- supports both ticket view and all-day view
- shows station throughput cards
- lets staff mark individual items fulfilled
- prevents expo from bumping a ticket if prep stations are still working
Timing rules in the current UI
The KDS uses two simple age thresholds out of the box:
- Warn at 12 minutes
- Critical at 20 minutes
That gives the screen enough tension to be useful during service without turning it into a wall of alerts all the time.
How tickets get into the KDS
Orders are grouped by station
Each OrderItem points at a kitchen station through the menu item. During sync, items are grouped by station and turned into KitchenTicket records.
The queue is sorted for actual service pressure
Urgent orders float up. On-hold work drops down. Ticket priority and age break ties after that.
Cooks work at the item level
A cook can mark individual items fulfilled. Once every item on a ticket is fulfilled, the ticket moves to ready.
Expo controls the final handoff
If a ticket belongs to an expediter lane, the system checks whether prep stations are finished before it can be bumped to served.
Views that already exist
Ticket view
This is the default queue view. It is best when the kitchen is working order by order.
All-day view
All-day view rolls active demand up by item. It is useful when the line needs a fast answer to a question like, "How many fries are we actually short on right now?"
Station metrics
The KDS also shows simple throughput cards by station, including active tickets, ready tickets, overdue work, and average age.
Current implementation notes
The KDS is fed by ticket sync logic in features/keystone/mutations/kdsTickets.ts. It already does a good job of reconciling orders into station tickets and keeping state consistent.
What it is not trying to be yet is a giant custom kitchen-ops platform with device provisioning, printer fallbacks, and every enterprise edge case built in. The foundation is strong, though, and the important restaurant concepts are already there.
The current KDS feels most at home in kitchens that want clean digital ticket flow, station routing, and better timing visibility without carrying the weight of a legacy POS stack.