As I have noticed electronic handheld terminals being used more and more by staff taking orders in restaurants this last decade or so I am curious: Those of you who are/have been using them, did they make your work more easy or more difficult? (I can imagine customer wishes that have not been anticipated by the menu designers being something of a pain).
I have never seen a waiter use a handheld device to take orders. Very few of the waitstaff in the restaurants we go to write anything down. I’m not talking about fine dining either. These are family restaurants for the most part. We often are in a group of four adults and four children and we order in the most haphazard fashion and they only very rarely get anything wrong with the order. If writing a few scribbles to remember the order slows them down too much to be worth it, I imagine that any sort of electronic device would be even worse.
(Just a customer as well)
A lot of restaurants these days use electronic cash registers anyway, and even if the waiter had to memorize your order at the table, he or she would probably have punched it in at the computer terminal just for billing purposes.
And for all-purpose notes, they can usually just type (touch) in any old phrase.
I used to frequent a movie theater that served food. The electronic order pad really helped because the order went to the kitchen right away, so the wait staff could get everyone’s order quickly before the show started, without going back and forth to the kitchen. It made the experience much better.
In a very simple restaurant environment, I suspect that handheld ordering machines are pretty effective. By simple I mean a chain type place that doesn’t change their menu all that often and when they do, the changes aren’t all that sweeping.
If the handheld can wirelessly send a printed chit to the kitchen, then all the better…no more need for wait-station terminals that you have to sometimes line up behind other servers to use to get your order into the kitchen.
For me, having extensive fine dining experience, I almost always wrote everything down, and then rang it into the kitchen using a Micros computer, which is established (if old) restaurant technology.
What sucks about using a computer to convey orders is when you have to put in a list of changes to the item, using a preset list of qualifiers. “No this, extra that, 86 the beets…” etc.
It can take up valuable time when you’re in the weeds.
As a professional cook for 26 years, I would love that, if only because it would put a stop to those waitresses who like to “sandbag”, i.e. going around and getting the orders from every table in their section and then dumping them on the kitchen all at once.
They can. The hand-held unit is basically the POS register in your hand, so you only enter things once and the orders are printed in the kitchen immediately (if desired).
In Montreal I was surprised that they brought me the scanner for my credit card at the end of the meal. That way the card never leaves your view. That was 2004 and I have never seen it anywhere since. The order did not use a handheld device.
That is common in Europe. It is related to “chip & PIN” in which you use a PIN even with a credit card - the card also had a chip on it and the reader communicates with the chip to verify the PIN. Canada is adopting this technology also with a 2010 date for implementation or the retailer has to pay higher fees and take more liability. The US will follow at some point.