Sending a meal out in courses, without a fine-dining till
A sit-down table wants starters, then mains, then pudding. A street-food bag goes out all at once. A till should ask which course a dish is for only when it matters — and the kitchen should see the ticket banded the same way.
Most of a food hall runs on one rhythm: order, cook, hand over a bag, next. A course never comes into it — everything on the ticket goes out at once. So for years the honest answer to "can your till do courses" was "it does not need to, and pretending otherwise would put a question in front of every taco."
Then a kitchen starts doing sit-down covers, and the rhythm changes. Now the same order is starters now, mains in twenty minutes, pudding when they are ready — and a ticket that lists all of it in one block is a ticket the kitchen fires wrong.
Ask only where it earns the tap
The trap is making everyone pay for the few. So courses are a table-service setting, off by default. A street-food counter never sees them. Turn them on and the till asks, as each dish is added, which course it belongs to — Course 1, 2, 3, numbered rather than named, because a number is one nobody has to spell and the kitchen reads it in order. The picker grows with the meal instead of showing twelve choices for a two-course lunch.
The kitchen sees the same bands
A course chosen at the till that the kitchen never saw would be worse than no course at all. So the answer rides with the line all the way to the pass: the current sale groups under its course headings on the register, and the kitchen screen bands the very same ticket under the very same headings. One order, one way of reading it, on both sides of the counter.
The lesson generalises past courses. A setting that is right for a sit-down restaurant and wrong for a burrito window should not be a switch everyone lives with — it should be off until the venue that needs it turns it on, and invisible to the venue that does not.