Head chef — the kitchen seen from your home page

You’re the head chef. You’re responsible for the kitchen running, the food costing what it should, and the team prepping enough for service without throwing out yesterday’s mise en place. The system knows that. When you sign in, your home page is built around the questions your job answers — not the marketing manager’s, not the owner’s — and the assistant in your pocket talks to you in the same vocabulary.

What it does

The home page on your first screen pulls together the four things you check every morning before you go on the line: what’s running low, what’s already on the prep board, what’s about to expire, and last night’s cost-vs-budget. The fifth tile is the assistant, primed to answer kitchen questions the way another chef would — “can we sub mortadella for the prosciutto on the pistacchio pizza tonight?” gets a recipe-aware reply, not a generic dictionary entry.

The assistant matters because the system knows your role. Every AI answer is composed of three layers: a general baseline, your venue’s house rules (what cuisine you serve, allergens you avoid, suppliers you prefer), and your role’s voice — the head chef’s framing. The owner asking the same question gets margin and supplier reliability in the answer; you get substitutions, BOM coverage, and prep math.

The alerts that ping your phone follow the same shape. You get the low-stock ping when service is about to be undersupplied, the prep-behind ping when a planned batch hasn’t been ticked off two hours before service, and the supplier-late ping when a delivery you were counting on is past due. You don’t get the social-post-due ping — that’s the marketing manager’s. You don’t get the cash-reconciliation alert — that’s the restaurant manager’s. Quiet inboxes are part of the design.

The rule

Your home page is what your role needs to see first. The system maps the questions of your job to the data on your screen and the voice in your assistant — and quietly hides what’s someone else’s job.

How to use it

When you sign in, the home page renders the widgets your role’s profile lists, in the order your role’s profile lists them. The default for head chef is: low-stock first, prep queue second, expiring items third, last-night cost vs budget fourth, assistant fifth. The owner can re-order or hide any of them in your role’s settings — but the defaults are the canonical kitchen morning.

The assistant tile is always on the home page, but it’s also accessible from the floating “Ask” button in the top right of every screen. You can ask it about a specific dish (“how much does the pistacchio pizza cost to make right now?”), about your prep plan (“what should I make ahead for tomorrow lunch?”), or about a supplier (“who do we buy mortadella from and what’s our usual order size?”). The assistant has your venue’s recipe catalogue, supplier list, and a snapshot of stock — it doesn’t have to guess.

Alerts come through the bot, on Telegram, at the schedule the venue’s morning cron picks. The default is one digest at 7 AM with all the things your role subscribes to. If two locations share you as exec chef, you get a separate prefix on each ping (“[Sukhumvit] low stock — burrata 2 portions”) so you can tell them apart.

When you also work the line

If you’re assigned head chef at one specific venue (not just “group exec chef”), your home page picks up that venue’s local stock, that venue’s prep board, that venue’s last-night cost. Switch the venue picker at the top of the screen and the home page re-renders. Your role’s voice in the assistant stays the same — what changes is the data it has to work with.

When you want a different layout

Open Settings → Roles, find your role row, and the role’s persona section lets you edit four things: the job description (one-pager guide for new hires, surfaced under “Your role” in the help drawer), the assistant voice (a paragraph of framing the AI prepends to every answer for this role), the alerts (which keys this role wakes to), and the dashboard layout (drag-to-reorder which widgets show on the home page). Save once and the change applies to every chef on every venue that hasn’t locally overridden it.

Worked example

It’s Saturday, 7:00 AM at iO Osteria. Chef Marco signs in on his phone walking from the parking lot. His home page lands and he reads it in twenty seconds:

Low stock (3) — mortadella under threshold, pistacchio cream under threshold, mozzarella di bufala bordering. He’ll call the deli on the way in.
Prep queue (5 tasks, 1 behind) — five batches scheduled for today; the dough for tonight’s pizza is the one behind. Two hours of fermentation to recover; he texts the prep cook.
Expiring today (1) — the burrata received Thursday hits its date tonight. He drops it onto the antipasto special.
COGS last night — 28.4% vs the 26% target. The wagyu burger was the outlier. He’ll look at the recipe at lunch.
Assistant — at the bottom. He taps: “What can I swap the burrata for if we run out tonight?” The reply names two stocked substitutes (stracciatella, fior di latte), notes one is dairy-allergen-safe per their menu’s declarations, and reminds him that the antipasto carbonara already uses stracciatella — so the venue would be down on that recipe’s mise if he reroutes.

Marco didn’t open four screens to gather that. The home page did it for him because his role told the system what to surface.

Where your information lives — explains the five rooms the home page summarises from.
Why multiple AI mouths — the same role-framing rule that drives the assistant’s voice on the home page also drives the assistant’s voice in every other surface.
Group settings — if you’re an exec chef across a group, your role’s settings live at the group level and ripple to every member venue.