Where your information lives — five places, one restaurant
When you open the admin app you find menu items, POS items, inventory, recipes, and events. Five different lists, all describing — in some sense — the same dish. This is not duplication. Each one is the source of truth for a different kind of question, and understanding which is which is the single most useful thing you can learn about the system.
This page is for owners, chefs, and managers who want to know why the app is shaped the way it is. After this, every other screen makes sense.
What it does
A restaurant has five overlapping realities, and they don’t reduce to one. The menu the customer reads is not the till the cashier rings, which is not the stock on the shelf, which is not the recipe in the kitchen, which is not the event package you sell to a wedding. The app keeps them separate on purpose — so each one stays accurate without forcing the others to bend out of shape.
Think of your restaurant as five rooms:
| The room | What it is | What it knows authoritatively |
|---|---|---|
| The window | The public face of every dish. The marketing description, the photo, the declared allergens, the wine grape, the region. | What the customer reads. What goes on the public menu. |
| The till | The cashier’s view. What gets rung up at the till tonight, at what price, with which modifiers, routed to which station. | Tonight’s price. Whether it’s orderable. Which kitchen makes it. |
| The pantry | The stockroom. How much of each thing you have, where it sits, when it expires, who supplies it, what it cost you to buy. | What’s on the shelf. Who supplies it. What it cost. |
| The kitchen | The actual recipe. What ingredients from the pantry produce one portion, in what quantities, at what yield. | What’s really in the dish. The cost per plate. |
| The events room | The private side of the business. Tasting menus for groups, full-venue rentals, services like sommelier hire or photography. | What you sell that isn’t a single plate on the menu. |
The five rooms talk to each other — the till knows which window item it represents; the kitchen draws from the pantry; events can include menu items. But each room owns its own truth.
How to use it
The carbonara scenario
A customer asks the menu AI: “Can I have the carbonara without gluten?”
To answer well, the AI needs five different facts, and it looks in five different rooms:
| The question | The room that answers | Why that room |
|---|---|---|
| ”What is the carbonara?“ | window | The description and the photo live where you wrote them for the customer to see. |
| ”How much is it tonight?“ | till | The price you charge at the till is the price the customer will pay. |
| ”Is it available right now?“ | till + pantry | The till knows if you’ve marked it unavailable; the pantry knows if you’ve run out of an ingredient. |
| ”What’s actually in it?“ | kitchen | The recipe lists every ingredient. The customer-facing description only mentions the main ones. |
| ”Does it contain gluten?“ | kitchen + window | The recipe is the truth; the public allergen tag is the declaration. They must agree. |
| ”Where does the guanciale come from?“ | pantry | The supplier is on the inventory item, not in the dish description. |
| ”Why is this dish on the menu?“ | the chef’s narrative (the window and the venue voice) | A story lives on the dish, or in the venue-level narrative. |
If all five rooms agree, the AI gives a complete, grounded answer — “It’s our carbonara made with guanciale from Amatrice. Yes, it contains gluten — the pasta is wheat. We can swap to a gluten-free pasta if you let us know now; let me check with the kitchen for cross-contamination.”
If one room is empty or wrong, the answer breaks at exactly that point.
The rule that saves you from writing the same thing twice
The narrative never duplicates the operational data.
If the supplier of your flour is Mulino Marino, write it in the pantry — on the inventory item itself — and stop. Do not retype it in the dish description, do not retype it in the venue’s story. The AI reads it directly from the pantry every time it needs it.
This is the single most important rule for using the app well. It is the difference between writing thirty rows of information for the whole restaurant and writing three hundred.
What you write in narrative (the dish description, the venue’s story) is only what is not already structured somewhere:
- The why of the supplier (“we chose them because their wheat is stone-milled the day we bake”), not which supplier (that’s in the pantry).
- The story of the dish (“this is the chef’s mother’s recipe from Sorrento”), not the ingredient list (that’s the recipe).
- The philosophy of the house (“we cook seasonally, we do not write a winter menu”), not the menu structure (that’s the categories).
- The voice of the team (“we say guanciale, not pancetta”), not the dish name (that’s the menu item title).
When you find yourself typing the same fact in two places, stop. One of them is the wrong place.
What this means for each kind of question you might ask
”Where do I change the price?”
The till. POS items hold the prices the cashier rings. If you change the price on the menu item (the window), the customer-facing site will show one number, but the till will still ring the old one. Always edit the till.
”Where do I change the photo?”
The window. Menu items hold the photos that the customer sees. The till doesn’t have a photo — it doesn’t need one. If you upload a photo on the wrong screen, the public menu won’t update.
”Where do I change the supplier of my mozzarella?”
The pantry. The supplier sits on the inventory item — not on the dish that uses it. If you have ten dishes that use mozzarella, you change the supplier in one place and every dish, every recipe, every cost calculation updates.
”Where do I write that I’m proud of where my flour comes from?”
Two places, in this order:
- The pantry has the supplier name. That’s the fact.
- The venue’s voice (a single notes field at the venue level) has one sentence on why you chose them. The AI combines the two when a customer asks about your bread.
”Where do I write that my carbonara is the chef’s mother’s recipe?”
The window — in the dish’s description, in the part you wouldn’t be ashamed to print on the public menu. If there’s something extra you want the AI to know but not the customer (e.g. “we serve this only when grandmother is in the kitchen”), use the dish’s internal notes.
”Where do I price a wedding tasting menu?”
The events room — not the menu, not the till. Events have their own pricing model (per person, per night, with a deposit) and their own booking lifecycle. The dishes on the tasting menu may reference menu items, but the package price lives only on the event.
”Where does the AI look for cross-contamination warnings?”
The kitchen first (the recipe shows what’s actually used), then the window (the declared allergens), then the internal notes on the dish if the chef has flagged a shared-pan or shared-fryer issue. The AI is told never to confirm allergen safety alone — it escalates to the manager.
Examples
- 🍕 Standard — You change the price of the Margherita. You open the POS item for Margherita, change the price, save. The till rings the new price tonight. The customer-facing menu shows the new price (because it reads from the till, not from the menu item). The menu item itself doesn’t need editing.
- 🍅 Common variation — You switch flour suppliers from Mulino Marino to Mulino Quaglia. You open the inventory item for 00 Flour, change the supplier, save. Every recipe that uses 00 Flour automatically reflects the new supplier in its cost; every dish description that mentions “our flour” automatically gets the new supplier when the AI quotes from it. You change one field, ten dishes update.
- ⚠️ Edge case — You wrote “made with Parmigiano Reggiano 24 mesi” in three different dish descriptions, and now you want to write why you chose 24-month instead of 12-month. Don’t put the why in three places — put the why in the venue’s voice (“we use 24-month Parmigiano because the salt crystal structure is more pronounced and it does not melt into the pasta”), and let the AI combine it with the per-dish mention. Edit one field, three dishes answer better.
Related features
- How the AI uses your food & beverage knowledge — what the AI does with all five rooms.
- Writing good dish descriptions — the four-part pattern for the window room.
- Photos and videos on a menu item — what goes in the window.