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Prep kitchens

A kitchen — sometimes called a station or an area — is a named slice of the back of house. A small osteria might run one big kitchen and nothing else; a brasserie with a baker on early shift and a separate bar program might split into three or four. Cucina for the main line, Bakery for breads and brioche, Pastry for desserts, Bar for syrups and infusions. Each prep task and each live batch lives in one kitchen, and the work-in-progress board filters by kitchen so the baker sees bread and the bartender sees syrups — never each other’s list.

This page is for two readers. If you’re the owner, start at “Why this page exists” — the segmentation is a small piece of plumbing that quiets the whole back of house. If you’re the head chef setting it up, jump to “How to use it”.

Why this page exists

A kitchen during prep hours runs three or four operations at once and they don’t share a workflow. The baker shapes loaves on a fermentation schedule; the pasta cook reduces a sauce on a stove timer; the bartender boils a syrup and bottles it. They look at the same screen for the same reason — the live queue of what’s in flight — but they don’t want to see each other’s work. The baker doesn’t need to know the bartender is steeping vermouth; the bartender doesn’t need to scroll past three pasta sauces to find the one syrup.

Kitchens are how the work-in-progress board narrows itself. The chef defines the areas once, assigns each prep to one of them, and from then on every cook opens the same page but lands on their own filtered view. The board stays the single source of truth — one page, one schema, one history — but the noise belongs to someone else.

The other reason this lives here is rhythm. Different areas have different start times. The baker comes in at four for the bread; the line crew arrives at seven for the sauces; the bar opens at noon for the night’s infusions. A single mixed list would have the baker scrolling past sauces that won’t be started for three hours. A filtered tab gives the baker exactly what concerns the four-o’clock shift and nothing else.

The rule

A kitchen is just a label on a prep — but every prep has one, even if the label is “unassigned”. The work-in-progress board filters by that label, so the segmentation is real even when the kitchen is small. One label per prep, picked when the prep is created and changed in two taps. Nothing else moves with it; this is purely the lens the board looks through.

What a kitchen is

A kitchen has three things on it. A name — the word that shows on the tab and on every card. A colour — a small chip on each prep card so the area is readable at a glance even on the All tab. An active flag — kitchens you no longer use can be archived without losing the history of preps that lived in them.

That’s it. A kitchen is not a permission boundary (anyone with prep access sees every tab), not a billing unit, not a physical location enforced by anything. It’s a tag on each prep that the board uses as a filter. The simplicity is the point: the chef can split, merge, rename, and reorganise without dragging history with them.

Every venue starts with one default kitchen — usually just “Cucina” — created the first time the prep board opens. From there the chef adds areas as the operation grows. A bread program starts: the chef adds “Bakery”. A cocktail menu launches: the chef adds “Bar”. Every new prep then picks one of the available kitchens, or lands in Unassigned until someone decides.

How to use it

Open the work-in-progress board — Back of House → Work in Progress in the sidebar — and the row of tabs along the top is the kitchen filter. All on the left, then one tab per kitchen in the order the chef added them, then Unassigned, then + Manage on the far right.

Defining the kitchens. Tap + Manage. The kitchens manager opens with the list of every area the venue currently has — active and archived. For each one to add, type the name, pick a colour from the swatch row, tap + Add. The new tab appears on the board immediately. The same dialog has Rename and Archive on every existing row.

Filtering the board. Tap a tab. The task list above and the live batches below both narrow to that kitchen. Tap All to see everything again; tap Unassigned to see only the preps with no kitchen pinned. The selection sticks in the page address, so a reload or a back button lands on the same tab.

Assigning a prep. When you add a task with + Add task or start a batch with + Start prep, the dialog has a Kitchen field. If you’re already filtered to a kitchen tab when you open the dialog, the field pre-fills with that kitchen — opening + Add task from the Bakery tab means the next prep lands in Bakery without picking anything. If you’re on All and you pick a recipe whose default kitchen is set, the field pre-fills from the recipe. Otherwise pick from the dropdown or leave it as Unassigned.

Setting a recipe’s default kitchen. A recipe that always belongs to the same area — the focaccia is always Bakery, the tonka syrup is always Bar — can pin a default. Open the recipe, find Default kitchen in the basics card, pick the area, save. Every new task or batch from that recipe now pre-fills the kitchen, so the chef stops re-picking the same value every morning.

Archiving a kitchen. A kitchen with history can’t be deleted, but it can be archived. + Manage, find the row, tap Archive. The tab disappears from the board, the area no longer shows in the + Add task dropdown, but every past task and batch that lived there still renders its name and colour on the history view. To bring it back, the same dialog has Restore on archived rows.

What happens behind the scenes

Creating a kitchen writes one row in the venue’s kitchen catalogue: name, colour, active flag, sort order. Nothing else moves — no tasks, no batches, no recipes.

Tagging a task or batch with a kitchen stores the kitchen’s identifier on that single row. The board’s two live queries — one for today’s tasks, one for active batches — each take a kitchen filter as an argument. When you switch tabs the page re-runs both queries with the new filter; the rows that match render, the rest stay loaded but hidden from this view.

Setting a recipe’s default kitchen stores the identifier on the recipe row. Every future task or batch creation reads the recipe’s default as a fallback when the operator hasn’t picked one explicitly. Existing tasks and batches don’t change — defaults only apply to new ones.

Archiving flips the active flag on the kitchen row. The board hides inactive kitchens from the tabs and from new-prep dropdowns, but every history view — the task list of a past date, the production ledger, the prep history — still resolves the name and colour from the row, so nothing on the audit trail goes blank.

Worked example — adding a bakery

Sara runs the kitchen at your venue. The osteria has always had one prep area called “Cucina” and a single list every morning: bolognese, stock, pizza dough, tiramisu. In March she hires Marco, who’s going to run a small bread program — sourdough, focaccia, brioche for the lunch sandwiches, a single grissini batch on Saturdays. He starts at five in the morning; the rest of the crew starts at seven. From day one she doesn’t want him scrolling through pasta sauces to find the bread.

Friday afternoon. Sara opens the work-in-progress board. One tab on the strip: Cucina. She taps + Manage, types Bakery, picks a warm beige from the colour swatches, taps + Add, taps Done. The board now reads All · Cucina · Bakery · Unassigned · + Manage.

She opens the four existing bread-related recipes — sourdough, focaccia, brioche dough, grissini — and on each one sets Default kitchen to Bakery, saves. Then she opens the morning prep template, finds the brioche and focaccia rows (the only bread on the existing daily list), and changes the kitchen on each from Cucina to Bakery. Saves the template.

Monday at five in the morning. Marco walks in, opens the work-in-progress board on his phone, taps the Bakery tab. Two tasks on the list — Brioche dough, 30 buns and Focaccia, 2 trays — and zero live batches. He taps ▶ Start on the brioche. A card appears with a beige Bakery chip in the corner; the chip is the only thing on screen that isn’t bread. At seven the line cooks arrive, open the same page, tap Cucina, and see their own list — bolognese, stock, tiramisu — without a hint of what Marco is doing one bench over.

A month later. The grissini are seasonal — they only run from October to February. In March Sara opens + Manage, finds the grissini recipe, deactivates it from the recipe list. The recipe still exists; it just doesn’t appear in the new-task picker. The Bakery tab stays. When the grissini come back in October she reactivates the recipe and the morning template picks them up again — same kitchen, same colour, same chip.

One label per prep, one tab per area, no extra screens.