The best new till is the one your staff have already used
Casual hospitality staff turn over fast and arrive knowing a Square or a Lightspeed. A register that copies the layout they already have in their hands is a register nobody has to train — so it copies the good ones on purpose.
The person on the till this Saturday may not have been on it last Saturday. Hospitality runs on casual staff, agency cover and the friend who is helping out because someone called in sick. None of them will sit through a training video, and every second they spend hunting for the pay button is a second a customer waits.
So the useful question is not "what is the cleverest till layout" but "what layout is already in their muscle memory." For a huge share of the trade the answer is a Lightspeed K-Series or a Square: the number pad on one side, the menu in the middle, a row of bottom tabs. Copy that, closely, and a new starter is productive on their first order because it is not really their first.
What copying it well actually means
It means the quick actions sit where the hand expects them — a column beside the keypad for the four things a cashier reaches for most, and it means letting the venue choose which four. It means a tender the owner has switched off never appears, so a button is never a lie. It means the bottom bar reads the way those tills read: a gear in the settings corner, and a Tables tab that only shows up, third from the left, when table service is on.
Familiar is not the same as frozen
Copying the layout is not copying the limits. The tiles are sized so a busy menu does not need a scroll, the whole register fits one screen because a cashier should never scroll mid-sale, and the settings a chain hides three menus deep are one clear list. The goal is a till that feels known in the first minute and better by the tenth — not one that is different for the sake of it, and pays for that difference in training time a food hall does not have.